


Always Gold

by kelsoarr, spooky_bee



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: "get a dick bro", Alternate Universe - College/University, Death Grips, F/M, GIRUGAMESH - Freeform, Gary Stu, Gen, Hardcore Punk that Will Actually Kill You, Horrible Midwest Liberal Arts College, Professor Hot Dad, Settlers of Catan, Snapchat, Super Smash Brothers - Freeform, apologies to anyone who likes twenty-one pilots, arguments over file sharing servers, broken label makers, coollattas, ed is a total down the hatch come on bitch, fuk u kimble, have fun figuring out all of these tags, hipster!Ed, hotline ling, it's just called two brothers, kitten smuggling, patrician!Roy, pizza jumpsuit, roy cries a lot, sand, table-top gaming, the fulmeatle, this is set in the US because reasons, tropical themed christmas parties
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-05-07 20:11:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5469464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kelsoarr/pseuds/kelsoarr, https://archiveofourown.org/users/spooky_bee/pseuds/spooky_bee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens when you take three college freshman (one with a prosthetic leg, one who steals animals, and one who runs an underground battle bots ring), an RA who wants to rule the world, a meme-loving fuck whose dad might be in the Chinese mafia, an asshole in a fedora, and put them all in a small college in the middle of nowhere?</p><p>The answer may surprise you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ready for the World About to Come

**Author's Note:**

> Things that are necessary to know for your understanding of the fic:  
> As the tags would imply (if you actually read all of them, which you should have, because they're Very Relevant), this fic does not take place in Amestris, but does take place in Our World, which is assumed to be the US for the purposes of this fic. Because of that, various places in the FMA universe are correlated with irl places, so Xing = China, etc. Also all of the ages have been changed so that everybody can be in college together. Ed, Al, and Winry are all freshmen, Roy et al are seniors, Ling and Lan Fan are sophomores. All chapter titles are song lyrics from The Mountain Goats, which we encourage you all to listen to to Set the Mood. This chapter's in particular is from "Slow West Vultures."
> 
> We also run a blog dedicated to the fic which will have extra stuff, information about updates, fanmixes, etc., which you can access at a1waysg0ld.tumblr.com

Ed slams the trunk on Hohenheim's sensible hatchback, rolling his eyes as he looks at one of his father's many stupid classics-themed bumper stickers for what will, hopefully, be the last time for a while. Al always thought the _vivant linguae mortuae_ sticker was clever, but Al is also a massive fucking nerd, so that comes as no surprise. Ed slings his favorite duffelbag--covered in band patches, which are at least ten times cooler than any bumper stickers concerning dead languages--over his shoulder and proceeds to reach for a box, only for Al to look at him with that annoying look of concern he's acquired over the last year, and proceed to scold him.

"Brother, maybe I should carry that," he says, trying to grab the box out of Ed's hands.

Ed scoffs; he knows Al means well but having his injury thrown in his face on this, the day he becomes a full-fledged college man, is a hit to his already volatile pride. "God, Al, I have a fake leg, not cancer." Al's look of concern deepens, which only annoys Ed further. It's not like he ever _wants_ to worry his brother, but "Al" and "looks of concern" have become practically synonymous lately.  "No, seriously, I'm fine. See?" He does a few high-knees while holding the box to illustrate how physically fit he is. "Totally fine," he mutters through gritted teeth, in what he hopes seems less like the pained grimace it really is and more like a convincing smile. Al looks positively wrecked with concern at this point.

"I'll take that," Winry says, coming out of seemingly nowhere, grabbing the box, and beginning to trot up the stairs.

"Win- Winry?" Ed sputters, looking wildly between her and his now empty hands. God damn it. "Hey! You don't even know where our room is!" Ed shouts after her. How had he not known she was here? Pinako's massive truck sounds like a fucking tank; you could hear that thing coming from five miles away, and she was still able to sneak up on him. Unbelievable, that girl.

"Yeah I do!" she shouts, not even bothering to look over her shoulder. "Al already gave me the key!"

Ed whips around to look at his brother, who merely shrugs in a near-perfect imitation of the shrug emoji, shit-eating grin and all. "Traitor," Ed whispers.

"Somebody has to take care of you," Al says, grabbing a trash bag full of clothes under each arm and following Winry into the building.

Ed mumbles under his breath about being a nineteen-year-old man who can carry his own damn stuff, and Hohenheim, the sunlight reflecting off of his magnetic sunglass clips, turns to look at him. "What was that, son?"

Ed looks at his father-- who has, of course, grabbed the only box of his containing books. He makes a show of rolling his eyes at Hohenheim before grabbing the one plastic bag of his left standing,  walking toward his dorm building before anyone can develop an association between the two of them. Nobody wants to start their freshman year of college and immediately be labeled "the professor's kid." He's cooler than that.

He looks down to see his old My Chemical Romance t-shirt pressed against the clear plastic of the bag. Okay, so maybe he's not cool  _yet_ , but he's getting there.

* * *

Roy really wants a cigarette. This is the third-worst part of move-in day every year, with the second being the heat from moving in at the end of August, and the first being dealing with the actual freshmen themselves. But the third-worst is definitely being unable to smoke. There's no rule against RA's smoking, per se, but he wants the freshmen to look up to him, to see him as a role model, and he refuses to lead them astray by showcasing his bad habits. And so his pack of American Spirit Blues sits in his back pocket like a kind of talisman, proof that he will survive this day. He's done it twice already, so he only has to do it one more time  _and then he'll be free._

He's been running up and down four flights of stairs all afternoon, and is on the verge of mental and physical collapse when his supervisor, Olivier, calls him into the res life office.

"So, I've got some news for you." She's got three different fans going in her office, and it feels like the tundra. 

"Good news?" he asks hopefully.

"News," she says. "We got notified a few nights ago that there was a student accepted on late enrollment. He's an international student, and since he accepted his offer late, we had nowhere else to put him but with you."

Roy  _really_ wants a cigarette.

"Wait. I'm an RA. I'm supposed to have a single."

"Yeah, you're not wrong," Olivier says, no trace of pity in her voice. "But in circumstances like these, exceptions are necessary." She reaches into the accordion folder of room keys and grabs one, handing it to him. "I let him in this morning, so he'll already be there. Why don't you go introduce yourself?" She gives Roy a rare smile in an obvious attempt at placating him. It's horrifying.

Roy tries to consider the positives of this situation as he ascends all four flights of stairs for what has to be the seventy-fifth time today. International students are notorious for being studious, clean, and introverted. He doubts he'll ever run into the kid. This will be the marriage of convenience of roommate assignments. Plus, it'll look great on his CV; a line about dealing with cross-cultural interactions will look excellent for any graduate programs he'd be considering. This was going to be fine.

He opens the door to his room, and begins to launch into his usual "Hi! I'm your new RA!" spiel, but only gets as far as "Hi! I'm--" before the rest of his sentence disappears.

Because, yes, there  _is_ indeed an international student in his room. Or, what he guesses is still his room, anyway. The whole room is covered in  _stuff_ : Anime figurines, board games, at least five different video game consoles, boxes of food, and one whole wall is taken up by a massive flat-screen TV. And, sitting on one of the beds in only a pair of bunny-print boxers and a silk bath-robe, eating a bowl of Captain Crunch and watching cartoons on the aforementioned massive TV, is his new roommate.

One of the cartoon characters punches the other in the face, and the kid shoots forward, knocking over the bowl of cereal, milk and all, onto the floor and shouting "Yeah! You get 'em, Pearl!" He turns almost comically slow, seeing Roy standing in the doorway, and grins. His mouth is still covered in bits of cereal. Roy can feel his eye twitch. "Oh, hey roomie! I'm Ling. Ling Yao. I take it you're Roy?"

Roy gives up. He takes his key and places it in his pocket, closing the door behind him as he walks down the four flights of stairs and out of the building to the two parking spots that are the campus-designated smoking area. If any of these freshmen die of lung cancer, it's gonna be his fault, and he'll feel guilty about it later.

* * *

"How are you holding up, Ed?" Hohenheim asks tentatively, following Ed up the stairs.

"God, Dad, I'm fine," Ed says, readjusting his bag in his grip and promptly losing his balance. He would have careened down the stairs if Hohenheim hadn't been behind him and ready to catch him, dropping the box of books. Hohenheim's eyes are worried behind the lenses of his glasses, and he opens his mouth, ready to say something, but Ed rights himself and continues up the stairs. He doesn't want Hohenheim to be worried about him. He doesn't want  _anybody_ to be worried about him. He's managed fine in the year since the accident, and is sick and fucking tired of people pitying him. If anything, his fake leg is an unexpected bonus. When he went as a pirate for Halloween the previous year, it was a fucking riot. All the neighborhood kids really admired his commitment to the costume. And, frankly, he doesn't want Hohenheim to pretend that he cares about him as much as he cares about his work. He's treated his research more like his child than he's ever treated Ed or Al.  _  
_

Ed drops the trash bag on the floor and promptly flops down onto his back on the blue, flame-retardant material of the dorm room mattress. "This is the worst, are we almost done?" he asks loudly, looking down and examining his very clean fingernails for imaginary dirt. He can feel his resentment towards his father coiling in his belly as his leg throbs beneath him. 

"Are you tired, Edward?" Hohenheim asks. He had looped back around to grab the books and has still managed to make it back to his room pretty quick. He's spry for an old guy. Their mom always liked to joke that he was immortal. "Maybe you should rest. I can take another trip down to the--"

"Maybe you should just go home, Dad," Ed says with a glare, sitting up. He can't deny that he's tired, and that his leg is bothering him, but he would never admit it, especially not to Hohenheim. "I can handle this myself."

"I want to help you, Edward," Hohenheim says with a weary sigh, already feeling the negative road this conversation is taking. "You're my son, and you're moving into college. This is a momentous occasion."

"I'm also an adult." Ed sneers.

"Edward, you're  _nineteen_."

"I mean, that's about how old Mom was when you met her, right? I bet you didn't tell her that she was a kid."

Bringing up his and Al's mom is a low blow, and he regrets it almost as soon as it leaves his lips. Their mom has been dead for almost a decade, and the wound still stings, but ever since she died, it's like Hohenheim has retreated even more into his work and he and Al have seen him less and less. He thinks he's allowed to be a little bitter. Still, the sad look on Hohenheim's face fuels his resentment with a new heavy dose of guilt, further fouling his mood.

He can hear Al and Winry chatting from down the hall, and blows his bangs out of his face, both to have something to do and to release some of his tension. 

"I think we got the last of it!" Winry says brightly, as her and Al enter the room.

"Don't you have your own shit to move, Winry? You don't need to carry all of mine," Ed huffs, effectively disguising his guilt behind a false bravado.

Winry scowls, setting down two boxes loudly. "What? You think I  _want_ to be carrying all your boxes up here in this heat? I'm doing this because you're my friend, so you could at least be grateful!"

"Yeah, brother!" Al says, placing a box on his bed so gingerly that Ed wonders if he, for some reason, brought some of their mother's china. "Winry's just being nice!"

"I think I should probably go," Hohenheim says, scratching bashfully at the back of his head. "I have a meeting with the rest of the classics department in a bit."

"You're leaving?" Al asks, thinly-veiled disappointment apparent on his face.

"Yes, I think you've got it covered. It was wonderful being able to be here for this, boys." He looks at Ed. Ed wishes that Hohenheim were angry, but he never is. He's only ever disappointed, and somehow that's worse. "I'm sure your mother would be so proud of you."

With Hohenheim gone, their dorm feels, somehow, too spacious, like there's no way that all their boxes and bags will ever be able to combine to make somewhere they could call "home." With the adrenaline of moving in beginning to ebb away, the reality of being really and truly on their own begins to settle in, and none of them can really think of anything to say. Luckily for them, they don't have to.

The box Al had placed so oddly on his bed emits a single, mournful meow.

Al's face pales.

"Alphonse?" Edward asks slowly. "What's that?"

Al chuckles nervously, opening up the box and grabbing something white and grey and fluffy.

"Is that... Purrseidon?"

"He would be lonely at home without us!" Al protests, Purrsedion softly mewing in tacit agreement. Typical.

Winry reaches over to scratch the cat behind the ears. "I think it's great that you brought him, Al." she says encouragingly, with a nod towards Ed.

"You're both fucking crazy," Ed mumbles, but a smile begins to lazily graze his lips as Winry sticks her tongue out at him and Al responds in kind. Looking at his brother and his best friend playing with their illegally smuggled cat in their new dorm room, he feels a little more at home.

* * *

With some nicotine in his system, Roy feels a little bit better. The coffee-with-a-side-of-coffee he had for breakfast this morning had probably not helped in making him so jittery, but he needed to be on campus by 7:30 since move-in started at eight, and there was no way he was going to swing that with no caffeine in his system. He's smoking his cigarette down to the filter, and is in the process of trying to decide whether to light another one or not when he hears someone shout "Yo, Colonel!" at him from across the parking lot.

The voice belongs to Havoc, and he and his house-mates--Fuery, Breda, and Falman, all of whom have gone by their last names for as long as he's known them--are all lugging large tupperware containers full of food.

"What are you guys doing?" Roy asks, crushing his cigarette butt beneath his shoe.

"Because it's move-in day," Breda says, "the caf is just letting in anybody. No meal swipe or anything! It's like Black Friday in there; we went in with containers and grabbed everything we could." He smiles excitedly.

"Living off-campus is really treating you guys well," Roy says drily.

"Not all of us can have free meal plans, Mustang," Havoc says with a smirk.

It's technically against the rules for people to take food out of the cafeteria. It's also technically against the rules for anyone except freshmen to be in the cafeteria today, but there's no point in pulling policy on his friends. They're out of his jurisdiction, and, frankly, it's just not worth it. Roy didn't fancy the idea of trying to take charge of Havoc, not in this lifetime. 

"Have you guys seen Riza?"  Roy asks.

Fuery giggles. "Shouldn't we be asking you that, Colonel?"

"God, stop calling me that."

Falman snickers. "Yeah, she is  _your_ Lieutenant."

"She's my  _nothing--_ " Roy begins to protest.

"Nothing? I thought you were best friends?" Breda chimes in slyly, the others stifling their laughter.

Roy rolls his eyes. "I mean. Aside from that. She is my best friend."

"And your 'most loyal subordinate,'" Fuery says, barely able to speak between giggles.

Roy drops his head into his hands as the gang explodes in laughter. It's not his day, and he is really in no mood for them to pull embarrassing drunk stories on him.

"Hey, don't you have freshmen you should be taking care of, being an RA and all?" Havoc asks, when he finally recovers from laughing at Roy's expense.

Roy's head snaps up from his pitiful reverie. "Fuck, you're right." He jumps up and begins to jog off back toward the dorm building. "Don't steal any more food while I'm gone!" He shouts behind him.

"Whatever you say, Colonel!" Havoc calls after him.

Roy checks his watch as he runs up the stairs. 2:30 PM. Soon, his day will be over, and he can maybe get some sleep, if his weird new roommate--nope, not gonna think about that right now. That is a problem for the Roy of the future. The Roy of the present has one more room of freshmen to check in. He swings by Olivier's office to grab a check-in sheet and heads back up to the fourth floor, doing a mental tally of the floor as he goes. Freshmen boys are never known for being the best, or most trustworthy, demographic of students, even somewhere with as good a reputation as Amestris University, but this crop of kids seem fine. Even his roommate seems...well, "fine" may be a bit of a stretch, but he's most likely not a criminal, or a sociopath who sells knives, like residents he's had in the past. He catalogues as he goes: athlete, athlete, guy loudly playing  _League of Legends_ , athlete, kid drinking a beer next to a kid holding a cat, athlete...wait a second.

He skids to a halt in the middle of the hallway, feeling the soles of his Oxfords scrape against the grainy carpet. Slowly, as if approaching a wild animal, he walks to the doorway of the dorm containing both underage drinking  _and_ an animal. It's like they're  _trying_ to give him premature grey hair.

The kid with the beer looks up at Roy like he honestly doesn't see what the problem is, officer, but the kid with the cat looks genuinely horrified. There's a girl with them too, who looks like she's been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

There is honestly so much going on in that room, and it's so early in the semester, that Roy isn't sure if he can deal with it all right now. Making it painfully clear he is ignoring the two incompetent boys who are actually residents of this dorm, lucky him, he reaches forward and hands the check-in sheet to the girl, who seems to be the most stable person in the room, says "Get them to sign this and return it to me," and stalks out without so much as making eye contact with them.

He barely makes it out the door before he hears someone shout after him, "Hey, asshole!"

Roy grits his teeth and turns around. "That's not a very nice way to greet your RA."

"Oh, you're my RA. That's neat, some upperclassman on a power trip thinks he can ignore me and my brother." Says the kid with the beer, who Roy briefly registers as both obnoxiously loud, and obnoxiously obnoxious.

Roy balks. "Oh, I won't be ignoring you forever, believe me. You're just breaking so many rules that it would take too long for me to address them all individually." Roy sniffs at the air. "What's that smell?"

"I'm making toast!" the other kid shouts from within the room.

Roy takes several very deep breaths. Yoga was supposed to help with his anxiety and stress, but thus far it hasn't been any more helpful than cigarettes or heavy drinking. "You can't have toasters, either."

"You think you can just order me and my brother around?" loud-mouth-beer-drinker shouts in his face.

" _I'm your RA_ ," Roy says, enunciating as clear and condescendingly as he can, " _That's my job._ "

"Listen, pal," the kid begins.

"Don't call me 'pal,' we're not friends," Roy says. He's supposed to be nice to the freshmen, to be a welcoming presence that they can come to in times of crisis, but he's really not feeling up to it right now. He's been having a shit day, so if this kid wants to tussle, then sure, they'll tussle.

"Yeah, you're damn right, we're not friends. I would never be friends with someone who smokes American Spirits."

"Wait, how did you--"

The kid nods down to his hand and Roy looks to see, to his horror, that he's still holding his cigarettes. Way to go, Roy. Way to be a fantastic role model.

"Okay, listen here, kid--" he begins, gesturing wildly at him with the pack of cigarettes when he hears a voice behind him say "Roy, what do you think you're doing?"

He turns around to see Riza, who he finally sees now of all times, while he is pointing at a freshman with a pack of cigarettes while said freshman is holding an opened can of PBR. The kid looks all of fifteen, and he looks like he woke up on the wrong side of a hangover. Riza, as always, looks perfect, even in this heat. Not a single hair is falling out of that clip of hers. He's not sure how she does it; that thing shouldn't be able to stay up, and by all accounts she should look worse than she does, but she doesn't. It's not fair.

"Oh, uh, just..." He fumbles dumbly in his mind for an explanation before giving up. "You know what, I can't explain this, so I'm just not gonna bother."

"Oh, I see how it is," the kid sneers. "You getting your girlfriend to fight your battles for you?"

That is the absolute worst thing he could have said to Riza Hawkeye, gender studies minor, and he will reap his punishment. Riza stalks toward him, shoving Roy aside. She stands several inches above the kid, arms crossed over her chest. "Do you have some riveting commentary on gender roles, little boy?"

His face goes a fairly unhealthy-looking shade of red as he shouts "Little? I'll have you know that since last year I've grown an inch and a half!"

Something small and white darts across the floor and between Roy's legs. "What was that?" he asks.

The other boy in the room jumps through the doorway, screaming "Purrseidon!"

"Purrseidon?" Riza asks. 

Roy closes his eyes to keep from punching something. "A cat. They brought a cat."

"You can't be serious," she says.

"I really wish I wasn't," Roy replies.

* * *

What an auspicious start to his college career: the semester hasn't even started yet, and he's already been caught underage drinking by his RA, his brother has snuck in a cat, and the RA's girlfriend called him a little boy. He's not sure it could get much worse.

"Little? I'll have you know that since last year I've grown an inch and a half!"

"What was that?" the RA asks, looking down at his feet.

And then Alphonse screams from their dorm, rushing out of the doorway and into the hall. "Purrseidon!"

Ed stands corrected; it  _can_ get worse.

The RA and the scary girl are conversing with each other quietly, and so Ed takes the opportunity to round on his brother. "Al, how did the cat get out?"

Al's face is pained. "You know how Purrseidon is, brother. Every time he sees an open door, he has an insurmountable urge to run out of it." This is true, and was not a huge issue at their place in the suburbs, but in a building full of freshmen, it's a slightly bigger problem.

"Well, where did he go?" Ed asks.

Al grimaces. "Um, I'm not sure."

"How are you not sure? He's your cat?"

"He's  _our_ cat, and my toast popped up when he got out," Al says, holding a piece of burnt toast in his hand.

"I can't believe toast got your cat killed."

"Brother, don't say that!"

"Yeah, if anything, toast got  _me_ killed," the RA says. He sits down on the floor, looking ready to accept the sweet embrace of death. "If my supervisor finds out that I not only let someone move in here with an animal, but that I let said animal  _escape_ , she'll decapitate me and hang my head on the wall of the res life office."

Ed freezes. "Oh god. Al, does Dad know that you took Purrseidon?"

"No."

"Al, oh my god!"

Al turns to the RA. "Purrseidon is our cat from home. I thought that he might rebel without us there, so I figured--"

"Dad's gonna kill us!" Ed shouts in mounting desperation, "and it's not like we can just avoid him, he works here!"

The RA's scary girlfriend turns to Ed. "Wait, who's your dad?"

"Van Hohenheim," Ed admits begrudgingly.

"Holy fuck!" the RA says, standing up suddenly. " _Dr._ Van Hohenheim? The classics professor?"

Ed grumbles, "Yeah."

"I took Platonic Ethics with him last semester! He's amazing!"

"God," Ed huffs. "Yeah, I know, he's so fantastic or whatever. But he's also gonna kill me and my brother if we don't get that cat back."

Roy places his chin in his hand. "Then it seems we're in the same boat; your dad will kill you if we don't find the cat, and my supervisor will kill me."

"What are you suggesting?"

"I'm suggesting that we work together." The RA says like the idea alone gives him indigestion.

Ed really doesn't want to. He knows that part of the reason the RA rubs him so wrong is because he was already in a shitty mood because of his leg and because of people being so damned worried about him, but there's still something about him that does not mesh with Ed at all. I mean, for fuck's sake, the guy is wearing Oxfords to move into a dorm building. That's just impractical.

"He's right, Ed," Winry says, coming out of the room. "Five of us could find Purrseidon a lot quicker than three of us."

He hates to admit it, but Winry's right. They've got to get Purrseidon back, even if it means that they have to send him back home. Hohenheim has already been disappointed in him once today, and he doesn't want to deal with that again.

"Okay, fine," Ed says. "Winry, you're on the first floor, right?"

"Yeah," she says, although Ed isn't really sure when she managed to move all of her stuff in since she's been hanging out with them all day.

"You take that floor, then. Al, you take the second floor."

"Got it," Al says, and rushes over to the stairwell with Winry following close behind. "I'll take the third floor. And you two," he points to the RA and the girl. "You can take this floor. We'll regroup in half an hour."

"Shouldn't I be organizing this?" the RA asks. "I'm the RA."

"Roy," the girl says. "Just let him do this. It's his cat. And besides, it's your fault it got out." Roy the RA grimaces at the admonishment as she begins to walk to the other end of the hallway, peering into everyone's opened rooms.

"Is she always like that?" Ed asks him.

"I'm gonna go help her look," he says, which Ed takes as a "yes."

On his way to meet up with Riza at the end of the hall, Roy stops by his own room, where his roommate, Ling, is still sitting on his bed watching cartoons, but is now eating Pop-Tarts instead of Captain Crunch. The Captain Crunch from before is still on the floor, bowl included, like some kind of weird, postmodern art piece about capitalism.

"You guys sounded like you were having a real Fun Time™ out there," he says around a bite of Pop-Tart, eyes locked on the screen.

"What?" Roy asks.

"A Fun Time™. You know, like trademark. You were having a trademarked fun time."

Roy shakes his head. He doesn't have the mental fortitude to process this. "Listen, the kid across the hall and his brother smuggled in a cat and now it's loose and we need to find it right now or my ass and his are both on the line. Would you mind helping?"

Ling whistles. "That's rough, buddy. But I really can't. I'm in the middle of a season right now, and I can't just  _leave it_."

"You can't... pause it?"

Scandalized, Ling gasps, placing a hand at his chest. "Can you  _pause life_?" He turns to Roy with a look of mock horror before turning back to the screen.

Consigning himself to his new roommate being completely useless, Roy sighs and shuts the door, leaving Ling to his cartoons. Riza has already made her way back to the other end of the hallway, and when they pass each other she says "No sign of the cat."

"Great. Earlier today I was begging for death to claim me, but I never wanted to die at the hand of Olivier Mira Armstrong. I always thought my death would be cooler. And that I'd have more accomplishments to go in my obituary."

"Stop being so overdramatic. I'm sure the cat is still in the building. Where else could he have gotten?"

"The cat's not in the building!" comes the voice of the angry kid's younger brother. The girl is behind him, nervously playing with her hair, with little angry himself in tow.

"Are you sure?" Roy asks.

"I knew this was gonna happen," the younger boy says, head in his hands. "Curse you, Purrseidon, and your obsession with opened doors! I always knew it was going to be your Achilles paw!"

"Al, that's not a real turn of phrase," says the older boy. "But you're right; this is bad."

"He's been declawed," the girl clarifies. "If he gets into an altercation with another animal, he'll die. And there are so many cars, too. This is super dangerous."

"This is why you shouldn't have brought him, Al." The older kid chides.

"I'm sorry, Ed! I just wanted this to feel like home."

"Well, now there's gonna be kitten blood on all our hands!"

Despite Roy's attempts to defuse the situation, the three freshman begin bickering in a nonstop back-and-forth that would be impressive if Roy wasn't still in fear for his life.

"Hey, kids! Hey!"

"Ed be ni-"

"Death! Kitten Deat-"

"Brother, Winry, ple-"

"Death! Death! Death! De-"

"YOU'RE SO IMMATURE!"

"YOU'RE IMMATURE!"

"WOULD EVERYONE JUST BE QUIET!" Roy feels the shout ripped from his body, and with a start the three all look up at him- the older boy and the girl nose to nose with the younger one attempting to sandwich in between them. The look of shock on their faces is almost comical, and it takes the last iota of Roy's remaining strength not to burst into completely unprofessional and untimely laughter.

Thankfully before he actually has to think of something to say in regards to his outburst, the door to his room opens, and Ling steps out, still holding a Pop-Tart. "Did you guys say that the cat got out of the building?"

"Yeah, it did," Roy says.

Ling nods a few times before saying "Hold on," and pulling out his cell phone. He dials a number, and when it picks up, he lets off a string of incredibly fast Chinese. Roy had almost forgotten that he was supposed to be an international student. His English was flawless. He listens to whoever is on the other line, nods once, and hangs up. "I took care of it," he says.

"Wait, what?" Roy asks. A lot of weird things have happened today, but this might actually end up topping it.

Ling holds up a finger to hush Roy's protests. "Wait for it." He states simply, eyes closed as he stands serenely in the hallway.

"Wait for what?" Ed asks, after they all stand in complete silence for a few minutes.

Ling continues to hold up his finger, waiting silently for a minute longer, and then holds up his phone. He says something quickly in Chinese, nods again, and hangs up. "Let's go outside." He says with a knowing smile, taking the stairs two at a time without bothering to see if any of the others follow.

"What? Why?" Roy asks, as they all jog after Ling.

"Don't question me, Roy. Just go outside."

They rush down the stairs to see a girl wearing an all-black track suit despite the heat, holding Purrseidon.

"Holy shit!" the older boy says.

"Purrseidon!" Al screams, rushing up to the girl and accepting the cat.

"Thanks, Lan Fan," Ling says. "You're the best." She nods wordlessly, and runs--literally runs--off somewhere in the direction of the academic side of campus. 

"Where is she going?" Roy asks.

Ling shrugs. "Who knows. She's always running somewhere."

"I'm glad Purrseidon isn't dead," the older boy says, walking up to the cat and giving it an experimental scratch under the chin. It promptly bites his finger. "You know what? I take it back. Go ahead and die, Purrseidon, see if I care!"

"Brother, don't say that!" Al snatches the cat back and begins to walk back into the building. "You're not allowed to play with him."

"Fine!" his brother shouts after him. "He has to stay on your side of the room!"

Roy walks up to him. "I think we have both managed to avoid death this day."

"Yeah, I think so." He pops a kink in his neck. "Listen, RA. I know we got off on the wrong foot--"

"The first thing you ever said to me was 'Hey, asshole.'" Roy responds.

"My point still stands. And I'm sorry. About that, anyway. I'm not sorry about the beer or the toast or the cat, but I am sorry for trying to fight you. I've been having a really rough day, and you just got caught in the middle. So let's start over." He extends a hand. "I'm Ed."

"Roy," he replies, shaking his hand.

"Well," Ling says. "This is a beautiful scene and everything, but I paused my cartoons for this, so I'm gonna go back up and finish those. See ya,  _Colonel_."

"Wait," Ed says. "Did he just call you 'Colonel?'" A mischievous smile breaks on the boy's face as he notices Roy's obvious distress.

Roy groans. "It's a really long story." He makes a mental note to thoroughly question Havoc on how that bit of info got out later on.

"It's a really  _good_ story," Riza says, turning and walking back into the building.

"Riza, come on!" All his friends, traitors.

Ed chuckles. "Anyway, I should probably get rid of the rest of my beer before your arrest me or whatever it is that you do."

"One, I can't arrest you; and two, you have  _more_ beer?"

"See ya, Colonel!" Ed calls, walking back into the building. 

Roy looks down, feeling the pack of American Spirits still in his hand. He walks lazily back over to the smoker's circle, sitting heavily on a bench and taking a cigarette out of the carton. He lights it, looking out over the campus of Amestris U. 

It's gonna be a long year.

 


	2. How Much Better Can My Life Get?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The title for this chapter comes from "Jenny" which is of course, by The Mountain Goats.
> 
> Check out these 17 new ways to ruin your friend's house party! When he gets to the last one, you'll be in tears.
> 
> aka The One Where The Gang Throws A House Party And Ed Makes An Ass Of HImself

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the long one, hope ya'll are prepared.
> 
> If any of you are curious/want to get into the mood for this bumpin' party the mix that Ling plays can be found here (http://8tracks.com/spooky_bee/she-s-got-them-hit-vibes) Ling is a vaporwave/synthpop loving dweeb.
> 
> Chapter 3 is already in the works so the wait won't be long. As the fic gets going we will be posting more and more content on our blog so be sure to check it out at a1waysg0ld.tumblr.com right now it is still under construction but it will look real hip and happening in the next week or so. All the comments and kudos make us happier than Purrseidon when he sees an open door, so thanks!
> 
> xx kelsoarr

Tonight is going to be great, Roy thinks to himself as he fiddles with his collar in the mirror. The damn thing just won't lay straight, how the hell is he supposed to go to this stupid party walking around with a crooked collar like some kind of ass- you know what, no. Tonight is going to be  _great_ , Roy thinks to himself with a bit more force. He needs to loosen up a bit, that's all. He steals a glance over at his designated red solo cup, "ROY" emblazoned on it in Riza's bold, blocky script. He sniffs it-- whiskey and Coke; bleh-- and promptly takes a giant swig.

"That's fucking _disgusting."_ He says aloud to the empty room with a grimace. He needs to loosen up but god, at what cost?

Roy thinks about his crooked collar again. He pours more whiskey into the cup.

"Ahh... I wish I was dead." He speaks once again to the empty room, mouth on fire from the horrible floor-cleaner he's ruining his precious organs with. Speaking of things that ruin his organs and/or life in general, where the hell is his roommate? Typically, Ling can be found doing one of two things: being with Lan Fan, or being with his TV, and Roy hasn't seen Ling with the TV or Ling in general all day. Not like that's a negative thing, necessarily, but it is strange. Just like it's strange that Riza Hawkeye is walking up to him right now outfitted in a royal blue dress that looks like it was tailored specifically for her while he still can't get his collar to  _not poke him in his goddamn left ear this is Hell welcome to Hell pleasethrowmeinthepithavemercy._

"Your collar is a little bit crooked." Riza says as she stops in front of Roy, promptly looking him up and down as if appraising a horse.

Roy sighs, "I know."

He doesn't want to be That Guy that wears the same outfit to every party, but he always ends up being That Guy anyway. He's wearing his nicest jeans--dark wash, not too skinny, but not too loose--and his favorite button-up shirt, a dark blue that--oh my god.

"We match," Roy says, horrified. He can't believe this. It's going to look like they coordinated this. They look like they're going to a fucking military ball. Havoc is going to give him so much shit about this, the Colonel and his Lieutenant, both in their military blues, and no one's going to believe him when he says that this was just a coincidence. 

"I'm gonna change into a different shirt," Roy says, pained to leave his party shirt behind, but before he can get out from Riza's gaze and get to his closet, Riza quirks one slender eyebrow and quietly takes the cup out of Roy's hand. She tilts her head back and drinks the whole thing in one go.

"That's- I... I added more-"

Riza sighs contently before shoving the cup back into Roy's still-outstretched hand.

"Let's fix this collar." She reaches forward and begins to smooth it down meticulously. Roy must be more intoxicated than he thought because as her hands brush over his collarbone he can feel his cheeks burn red. This is why he sticks with wine.

"How many people is Havoc having over at his place tonight?" More like  _how many people are gonna make fun of him for unintentionally matching Riza_. 

"It's Havoc; who knows. Though he said it should mainly be the Central crew tonight."

"That's a relief." Roy says, both in regards to the party and to the fact that Riza actually managed to fix his collar. This is why she was his best friend. 

"There, perfect." She gives him a small smile. "Now let's head over before they burn the place down."

He could only be so lucky.

___

"Ed- do you really have to wear that jacket?"

Ed scoffs, pulling the crimson suit jacket even tighter around his slender frame. "It's called style, Winry, look it up."

Winry rolls her eyes so far back Ed is afraid for a minute they might get stuck. To her credit, Winry actually looks pretty nice. Not that he's spent a lot of time looking at her or anything because, ya know, it's just Winry. But he can't remember the last time he saw her without grease covered arms and a bandana hunched over her latest engineering project, and now she's in a black strappy thing tucked into a higher waisted skirt with pleats? He thinks they're called pleats? Whatever, something cool, is the point. She looks cool.

And so does Ed. This red suit jacket is his sweetest possession, aside from the black Doc Martens currently adorning his feet, which are his children. The point is he and Winry both look cool as hell, and Al looks like a massive dweeb. Which, considering the three of them are on their way to the first party of the year, is not ideal.

"Hey professor, how's that sweater vest treatin' ya?" Ed asks Al with a smirk, casually throwing his arms back to cradle his head.

"Pretty great, how are those bricks attached to your feet?"

Ed snorts. "You and Winry both could use a style lesson, bro. We're in college now, going to a college party. There's gonna be booze, and older chicks, and... stuff." He finishes lamely.

"Oooo... stuff." Al says mockingly.

Ed shoves him playfully, "Asshole, you know what I mean." 

"Sure I do, and I also know that jacket is hideous."

Winry lets out a bark of laughter and hooks arms with Al, "How about you escort me to the party, professor, and we leave this child in the dust?"

"Gladly, pretty lady."

The two of them put on matching smug grins while they leave Ed, jaw to the floor, standing on the darkened street in shock. After a few seconds he finally regains his wits and chases after the two.

"Oi! Wait for me!"

This party better be worth it.

___

"This party better be worth it." Roy mumbles as he and Riza arrive at central, Roy clutching his portable record player and a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, despite Riza's vehement protests in regards to the record player in particular. Much like the party shirt, Roy brings his record player to every party he goes to, at least at Central, where he can be reasonably sure that no one will break it. It's not a super nice record player, or anything, just a little portable Crosley with a red leatherette case that latches closed and has a handle. Havoc had asked him why he insisted upon doing this way back when it had first become a habit, and Roy had answered that he had better music taste that anyone who would show up a Havoc's house and pointed at the handle of the record player which, when closed, looks like a tiny suitcase. "It's portable for a reason, Havoc, of course I'm gonna bring it."

Central was the nickname that Havoc's house had been stuck with after what could be considered an unfortunate campaign of Dungeons and Dragons. Aside from Riza and Roy, who live on campus thanks to their illustrious positions as RA's, everyone else in their friend group lives at Central: Havoc, Breda, Fuery, and Falman. Central is in a prime location in that it is down the street from the grocery store, the liquor store, campus, and the park. The only downside was the place was a duplex, and the roommates on the other side- no. Roy was here to have a good time, he wasn't going to think about  _him._

As he and Riza approach the back door to enter Central, Roy thanks his lucky stars that they are there relatively early by party standards and that no one should have arrived yet. Which is what makes what he sees upon opening the door even more uniquely horrifying.

"The golden trio! I"m so glad you guys can make it!"

Roy opens the door to see Havoc squeezing the life out of three hapless individuals, which he quickly realizes are the three hapless freshman whose cat had nearly gotten him killed only a couple days ago.

"Ed... Al?"

"Winry?"

Roy and Riza squeak out their residents' names nearly simultaneously. It is never pleasant as an RA to run into your residents off duty, it is even more unpleasant if you and said residents were introduced to each other through mutual scheming in hiding an illegal cat. It is astronomically unpleasant if these residents are then in your best friend's house, getting hugged by your best friend, getting offered _M_ _iller_   _Li_ _te_ _by your best friend_.

"Havoc! They are  _children!"_ Roy begins to scold.

"Children?" The girl says in indignation, placing her hands on her hips in a very good imitation of a five-year-old about to throw a tantrum at her birthday party. "We are not children. We are in college just like you- thank you very much." Ed looks up at his friend with badly disguised admiration. This was all so high school. Roy felt embarrassed even tangentially being related to this whole fiasco.

"You're also definitely below the legal drinking age." he admonishes, raising his hands up in what he hopes is a placating manner. "And as an RA I feel like it's my responsibility to make sure-"

Havoc saunters up to Roy. Obviously he had a swell time pre-gaming, and places his arm around his shoulder heavily.

"Ya on duty tonight, Colonel?"

"Don't fucking call me that, Havoc."

"Well then answer my question,  _Colonel Mustang."_

Roy can hear the three freshman giggle, and to his absolute horror he notices Riza suppressing a laugh as well. He reminds himself that he is a calm, collected, individual and calm, collected individuals do not elbow their friends in the throat at parties.

"I guess I'm not, Havoc." He finally responds through gritted teeth.

Havoc removes his arm, and ruffles Roy's hair. Roy wonders if his friendship with Havoc will survive this night intact and tries to remember his breathing exercises.

"Well then don't be a fucking buzzkill, dude. They're all 18 and don't even try to pretend you weren't talking a few booze cruises yourself at their age-- unless you want me to jumpstart your memory by telling everyone the story about that one incident freshman year when you-"

"Beers for everyone!" We'll get the cups!" Roy grabs Havoc and steers him the short distance from the living room to the kitchen. Central was home for all of them but it certainly wasn't "big" or "nice". Since it was a duplex it was technically the back half of the house, making the whole layout a bit awkward. There was a short psuedo-entryway that led to the living room directly in front of you, and the kitchen was directly to your right. The only thing that even gave the kitchen and living room some semblance of separation was the breakfast bar that divided the two spaces. Roy was lucky the party was decidedly crowded because that was the only way he managed to get Havoc alone from the rest of the group while still being in the same room, technically speaking.

Havoc starts cackling as Roy angrily fills some cups with beer from the keg shoved in front of the dishwasher.

"Relax, Mustang. It's a party, people typically have fun at those." Havoc leans against the wall and pulls out a cigarette as Roy places all the cups down and gets to work opening his bottle of Cab Sav. He has a feeling he'll need to drink the whole thing in order to survive tonight, so why waste time with cups? He takes a huge swig straight from the bottle, then turns to look Havoc directly in the eye. He can see the other man slowly start to realize Roy might be a _bit_ madder than he anticipated, and his smile falters.

"Listen Roy I wasn't really gonna tell-"

Roy stops him. "Smoking is bad for you." He says in a deadpan voices, eyes still locked with Havoc's he plucks the cigarette from his fingers-- taking a long drag before handing it back.

Roy exhales. "I knew you weren't going to, you value your life more than that." He smiles at Havoc and he sees his eyes light up with relief. As unlikely as their friendship seemed, Roy really valued Havoc's company. As necessary as it is for someone to be the resident buzzkill, Roy did occasionally want to have a good time, and Havoc had the uncanny ability to loosen him up better than a badly mixed whiskey and coke ever could. Plus he couldn't kill him before he knew why the  _fuck_ Havoc had already made friends with the three people on this campus he was so desperate to avoid.

"Want one of your own?" Havoc offers Roy a cigarette. Pall Malls. Disgusting.

"No thanks, it really is bad for you." Roy takes another huge swig of wine. "Total poison. So how the hell do you already know three freshman, Havoc? The school year hasn't even started. Also," Roy adds as he looks around and realizes this party is most definitely not confined to the Central crew, "why are there so many people here? Half these people don't even look like they go to our school!"

Havoc shrugs and stalls for time with a unnecessarily long drag of his cigarette. Roy taps his foot impatiently and absentmindedly wonders if Riza will be pissed at him for abandoning her, yikes. At least if they don't stand together, the number of shitty comments about their matching will be low. There have been rumors circulating about the two of them since they were both practically kids, and while they haven't been able to escape them entirely upon coming to college, Roy doesn't want to add fuel to that particular fire.

Havoc exhales after what feels like a ridiculously long time for someone who must have such shit lungs, "Ya know, Roy. I'm a popular guy. I can't control who from what school comes to one of my parties. And as far as the freshies are concerned, I could ask the same of you."

"W-what? I know them because I'm their RA!"

"Ah." Havoc takes a final drag from his cig and puts it out in one of the million ashtrays that litter the house. "That makes sense, let's bring them some beers."

"That... that still doesn't answer my question!" Roy says in exasperation as Havoc starts to precariously balance the red solo cups in his hands and mouth.

Havoc mumbles around the cup and shrugs, walking away to the freshman and Riza.

Roy stares dejectedly at the now completely packed party, and takes another swig from the bottle. His head is starting to feel light and he breathes a shaky sigh of relief as the buzz from the alcohol and nicotine washes over him. He notices a bottle of passably decent vodka next to him and takes a swig from that, too. If life is determined to fuck him then he might as well get completely blitzed.

He takes a hold of the wine and his record player, Havoc and Riza can handle the freshman, see if Roy cares. He takes another swig, after the vodka the wine goes down like grape juice. Now it's time to find an outlet, he thinks as he stumbles past the crowd that has accumulated in the kitchen. Someone needs to class up this fucking party with music.

\---

Ed is feeling good. He is feeling  _good._ Props to Al for running into this Havoc guy at one of the many back to school meet and greets Ed had ditched, cause this party is fucking lit. He stands up with a giggle as his head swims, he really needs to piss. He crushed a few beers in seconds during a drinking contest with some chick named Paninya and now the room is slightly lopsided but in a good way. Everything is fuzzy at the edges and slowed down, like a movie with a shitty frame rate. Ed is walking around to somewhere but he can't remember where. Was it the bathroom? Oh man, and Winry standing up to Roy was awesome, too. He thought for sure Colonel Fun Police was about to kill their vibes but it seems like he's more bark than bite, at this point. Or really, Riza is the bite and they are all just lucky she's out to have a good time as well or they'd be fucked. Wait, where's Al- oh, he's with the Chinese girl who found Purrseidon over there. He better go see if he's okay- damn, wow, he needs to pee really badly. Oh yeah, he got up to look for the bathroom. 

Ed giggles to himself again and actually heads in the direction of the bathroom this time, as he parts through the crowd he notices Roy Must-lame trying to plug a portable record player into an outlet and failing miserably.

"Jus- jus get in the fuckin, ohmygod."

Roy falls heavily back on his haunches and defiantly chugs down the remnants of a bottle of wine sitting next to him.

Seeing the dude that nearly ruined his first college party, as well as nearly got him written up on move-in day, in such an obvious state of distress is uniquely satisfying, and Ed is determined to dig a knife in while he's drunk enough to have an excuse to act like a total shithead. "Need some help, Colonel?" He offers, leaning against the wall in front of the outlet and staring down at the other man with the smuggest smile his face is capable of-- Which is super fucking smug. 

"Ah!" Roy slurs, "Jus who I need, the shortest person in the room. See how tiny this outlet is, maybe your munchkin fingers could help me fit it in here?" He waves the cord in front of Ed's face before scoffing and bringing the bottle of wine back up to his face. "Whatthefuck who  _drank_ all my  _wine?_ " 

Ed feels his blood start to boil at the comment about his height and moves to yank the bottle away from Roy, only to pull Roy along with him.

"What the fuck, how strong are you?" Ed asks angrily as they start wrestling for control of the bottle, he hadn't intended to start a fight but he couldn't just let the guy have the bottle now or he'd look weak as hell. 

"It's called fitness, read a book!" Roy responds angrily, fingers clasped like iron around the neck of the bottle.

"What does fitness have to do with _books_?" Ed asks. How dare this American Spirit smoking motherfucker excuse  _him_ of not working out? This guy looks like his idea of fitness is a goddamn aerial silks class.

"What do books have to do with your _face_!" 

"You're drunk!" Ed's hands start to slip on the bottom of the bottle, fuck shit--

"You're drunk!"

"Yeah I fucking am!" Ed is kinda losing track of why he wanted the bottle in the first place, all he knows is he's pissed as fuck at Roy Mustang.

"So am I!" Roy shouts, also starting to seem confused as to why he's this invested in an empty wine bottle, but he tightens his grip nonetheless.

"Why are we shouting!" Ed finally lets go of the bottle and he and Roy stare at each other in equal parts anger and confusion.

"I-I can't remember!" Roy says, panting heavily. 

They stare at each other for a few uncomfortable seconds, both obviously still mad but unsure how to continue their fight without the aid of the wine bottle tug-of-war. Ed settles with throwing his hands up in the air and shouting "I really have to pee!"

"The bathroom is right over there, asshole!" Roy shouts back. Visibly relieved they are back to shouting at each other.

"Thanks, dipshit!" Ed retorts, stalking off to the bathroom and leaving Roy to plug in his shitty record player. His buzz isn't killed but his vision has definitely taken on a red tinge, the anger building up inside of him threatening to boil over like a noxious volcano. Ed wouldn't say he has anger issues, his anger isn't the issue-- the issue is the people who make him so fucking angry in the first place. That being said, when he's on a rampage like this he knows that other people can easily get caught in the crossfire, so all he needs to do is make it to the bathroom, take a leak, and chill the fuck out before he runs into someone he knows and makes a bigger mess of things. So of course on his way up the stairs he runs into Winry.

"Ed!" Winry shouts, scooting past people she was talking to with a big grin on her face to make her way over to Ed.

God fucking damn it, Ed thinks. He tries to act like he doesn't hear her and begins walking faster to try and get to the bathroom, the last person on Earth he wants to see him like this right now is Winry. Can she not notice how mad he looks? Why doesn't she leave him the hell alone and go back to her friends, great-- now they are  _all_ looking at him expectantly, like they want him to join the conversation. Isn't that just wonderful? Terrific. Splendid. Can someone please stab him in the eye?

"Ed!" Winry repeats again, a bit of hurt entering her voice as she catches on to the fact he is purposefully ignoring her. "Ed? Ed- talk to me!"

Ed's anger feels like fire is coursing through his veins as he picks up the pace and finally reaches the doorknob to the bathroom door. He knows deep down Winry isn't trying to piss him off but through the haze of alcohol the reasonable part of his brain is on mute. Can she not take a hint? If he can just make it into the bathroom then he can explain why he's acting like a total dick to Winry later. Say he was throwing up or something, whatever. 

The bathroom is locked. Ed shakes the handle so hard he wonders if he might even rip it out, but a man's voice angrily shouts back "It's occupied!" so he stops before he can find out. Winry reaches him, putting a hand on his shoulder and turning him around. He can feel his muscles tense up as he stares daggers back at her, she takes a step back once she sees his face but then steels herself.

"What the hell is your problem, Ed? Some of my friends from battle bots are here, I've been trying to introduce you but you've been chugging beers with my roommate all night."

Ed notices a strange tone in Winry's voice and his heart twinges with guilt. Winry is a total metal-head both when it comes to music and when it comes to her career, as she spends a large portion of her time building robots and winning some intense competitions. She's been inviting Ed along to matches to meet her friends for months but he's been a bit... preoccupied. The point is he'd never made it, and he knew it was important to her, but right now really was  _not_ the time to remind Ed of yet another one of his shortcomings.

"I'm a bit busy Winry, can you take a hike?" He says as levelly as he can, turning away from her to pound again on the door. "Oi! Hurry up in there!"

The occupant pounds back and Ed raises his hand to hit the door again when Winry stops him. Damn her and her crazy buff arms.

"Ed can you open your eyes for once and realize I've been trying to spend time with you all night!"

Ed whirls back on her, he can't tell what her game is but if she wants a fight so bad then okay, she can have a fight. "Oh I don't know, Winry, can you open your eyes instead of your mouth for once and realize _now is not the time!_ " As he approaches the end of of his sentence he realizes his voice has raised to a shout, and Winry looks both shocked and like she's trying to hold back tears. Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no.

'I mean... jesus fuck, I'm sorry Winry-" She sniffles and his heart constricts. Why is he such a fucking mess? " Can-can't you like, go hang with Alphonse or something? I'm sick, I- I just need into the bathroom- I'm sor-"

The bathroom finally opens and Ed immediately falls and stumbles into the arms of the person exiting it, he hadn't realized in his drunken stupor that he'd still been leaning his arm against the stupid door.

"In that much of a hurry to get in?" Says the inconsiderate bathroom user, in a voice that reminds Ed weirdly of hot oil hitting a pan- the statement sounds innocent but he has a distinct feeling he's being insulted as the man smiles down at him.

"Just- just let me the fuck in." Ed shoves the man off, going into the bathroom and closing the door. Waves of anger and guilt crash into him with equal measure as he realizes he left Winry alone in front of the bathroom crying, isn't that just great. Ed leans against the door and slides down before hitting the floor with a heavy thump. He puts his head in his hands and wishes he'd cry, too. Maybe then he'd feel less like a complete asshole. 

Ed finally goes to the bathroom, and spends nearly half an hour in there running his head under the faucet in a vain attempt to sober up enough to go talk to Winry. As he stares at himself in the mirror he makes a vow that no matter how plastered or pissed off he gets, he's never going to allow himself to make Winry cry like that again. It's unacceptable at this point, he's a man. She's his best friend. He should be the one protecting her from assholes that hurt her, not be the cause of her tears. What would his Mom think, seeing her oldest son act like this? No, He'll make it up to her. No one can match him when it comes to bravery, all he needs to do is talk to Winry and he can redeem himself, surely.

He takes a deep breath to calm his nerves, (he knows from experience Winry has a mean right hook) and exits the bathroom. As he makes his way down the stairs he notices Roy finally managed to get the record player plugged in, as he and Riza seem to currently be arguing about whether or not Roy should actually play his record or not. Alphonse is with Ling and Lan Fan engaged in what must be a stimulating conversation as both Ling and Al are talking very loudly while waving their arms about. Lan Fan remains stoic with only the hint of a smile gracing the corner of her lips as she stares at Ling. Havoc and Paninya, who Ed realizes is indeed Winry's roommate from the one time he actually met her, are standing on the couch dancing wildly to whatever music is being played. It's not Ed's tatse but he can't deny it fits the vibe of the party. He keeps scanning the room. Where the hell is WInry? He's about to give up and interrupt Al to ask when he finally catches sight of her blonde hair in the kitchen, partially obscured by some dark haired dude with a ponytail leaning against the counter.

Ed smiles and begins to make his way towards her, passing by Roy and Riza as he does so.

"Roy, Ling already put on a playlist and everyone likes it, can't you give the records a rest this time?"

"He's just playing vaporwave, Riza! Turn on your computer and hit a few keys and you can make it, but Sufjan is raw, and beautiful and _everyone_ needs to hear _Carrie and Lowell_ at least once in their lives!"

"Okay sure, but maybe not while black-out drunk at a party!"

Wow, that Roy guy must be a Pitchfork lurker to have taste that basic, Ed thinks with a chuckle as he finally gets to the kitchen. He raises his hand to flag down Winry when he sees her smile and laugh up at the ponytail guy-- as he puts an arm around her waist and pulls her close enough to whisper into her ear.

Ed's smile is short-lived as he sees the strange man's lips whisper against Winry's skin. She giggles. His insides feel like curdled milk and he gets the strange desire to throttle the guy, but before he can so much as lower the hand he had raised to call her attention he and Winry make eye contact.

He wishes he could disappear as he sees her look of happiness fade to disdain, and before she can say anything to him he turns around as quickly as he can and heads to the living room to find Al.

He needs another drink.

___

Being best friends with Ed isn't easy, but it was worth it. Seriously. Winry knew what a lot of people said behind her back when it came to Ed and Al, even after Ed got into the car accident that cost him his leg and set him back a whole year in his life people still struggled to find sympathy for the angry young man-- but not Winry. She knew the side of Ed that was overwhelmingly kind, rock-solid in his ambition, genuine in his devotion and affection, steadfast in his beliefs and those he loved to a fault. Ed reminded Winry a lot of the sun, sometimes he illuminated all the dark places, and sometimes she got burned, but she would never love him less for it.

As they headed to the party she smiled as she thought about the fact that, in a way, she was proving everyone who'd talked about the trio behind their backs right-- she did love Ed. She supposed that she had always loved Ed, but it never really clicked with her until the past few months or so as they prepared for college together. It wasn't like the idea of dating Ed was completely new to her, it's something she'd thought about briefly as time went on and they grew from children, to teens, to the young adults they are now. She knew Ed must have thought about it too. The only problem is Ed's head is so thick there's no way he'd be the first one to make the move, so that left Winry.

She'd been plotting out this day since she knew they were going to the same school. It was the perfect strategy. A party is the ideal place to get Ed to drop his defenses enough to feel what Winry is sure they have been both been feeling for a long time now, there's no way the butterflies and awkward tension between them whenever they were left alone or unexpectedly touched was _completely_ one-sided. She'd even spent all this time putting together an outfit. The skirt was itchy and she felt a bit embarrassed but she'd noticed Ed steal glances at her whenever he was talking to Al and she was sure he was impressed.

When they finally arrived at the party and her RA Riza and the other guy, Roy, showed up she thought for sure everything was going to be spoiled-- but when Havoc came back with beers it took all her self control not to jump up and down, she was so giddy. This literally couldn't be going better. Soon they would all start talking, her and Ed would drink a couple of beers, the group would split off, leaving the two of them alone together. As the night wore on Ed would let down his guard more and more, until WInry could finally muster up the courage to admit to him how much he meant to her.

Except, everything went to utter shit. 

Shortly after Havoc came back, he and Ed got into a heated debate over the quality of different beers and they went off to some corner to have a taste-testing competition to prove the other wrong, leaving Winry alone with Riza and Alphonse. Even still, the night was salvageable. Riza and Al were great company and even if Winry felt a bit soured on the whole party business because of Ed's lack of attention, there was plenty of time left and she felt determined to have a pleasant evening on her own, damn it.

Now, Winry is a reasonable person. She would like to think of herself as above petty things such as jealousy, but everyone is allowed their moments, and this is one of her's, and she refuses to feel guilty about it. Because on the night that was supposed to be her night, the night where she finally got the man she loved, she had so far been stood up in lieu of beer, was tipsy, was left alone with her RA, and wanted nothing more than to take off this damn skirt. And when she excused herself to go take matters into her own hands to find Ed, she found him alright, with her fucking roommate. 

A group of people stood around the two shouting "Chug! Chug! Chug!" As Ed and Paninya opened up beers, linked their arms with one another, and proceeded to chug the beers simultaneously. That required intense levels of synchronicity and skill. It was impressive. It was jaw-droppingly impressive.

Winry wanted to sock them both in the face.

So here she is now, in search of booze, any booze at this point. She needs something to numb the aching pit of disappointment gnawing at her stomach so aggressively. As she walks over to the kitchen in search of something to drink she runs into the girl from the great Purrseidon escape, leaning against the corner.

"Looking for something?" She asks casually. She is wearing all black, just like Winry remembers from the one and only time they'd met before. Her hair is pulled back simply, and she exudes confidence from every pore. Winry has a feeling she is someone you'd want on your side in a fight, she seems stable and trustworthy enough.

"Yeah, I, uh... I really need a drink."

Winry wonders if she sounds as frazzled as she feels. The girl looks her in the eye, Winry feels caught in her gaze. The stare doesn't feel rude or judgmental, just curious. After a few seconds the girl looks away and she pulls a flask out of the back pocket of her jeans and hands it to Winry.

"Here, you look like you need this," She states simply, "My name is Lan Fan."

Winry takes a swig gratefully, she doesn't know what is in it but its definitely alcohol and she isn't concerned about the particulars at this point.

"Thanks Lan Fan, my name is Winry. Are you an exchange student like Ling? Both of you have perfect English... I never would have guessed."

A ghost of a smile graces Lan Fan's lips as she crosses her arms and looks down at the floor. 

"Yes, just like Ling, I guess you could say that." Lan Fan says vaguely, turning to glance at Ling. Dressed in a tank emblazoned with "Suns Out Guns Out" and maroon joggers, Ling is standing with the thoroughly out of place Al in his sweater-vest and slacks at the other side of the party. Both the boys are laughing about something, Ling leaning heavily against Al as they try to catch their breath between laughs. Winry takes a break from her own self-pity to feel pleased that Al at least seems to be having a good time.

She takes a few more sips from the flask while her and Lan Fan stand in companionable silence. It's nice, and she finds herself feeling marginally better from both the alcohol and the stable company.

"You want the last bit?" She doesn't want to drain the flask without asking first.

"No thanks, I don't drink." Lan Fan states, still staring off at Ling-- who has moved on to doing what is obviously a Roy Mustang impression that the majority of the party finds hilarious.

"Then why do you have a flask?" Winry asks before promptly drinking the rest of the mystery alcohol.

"It's Ling's."

What the hell kind of relationship do these two have? Winry thinks, is this what people see when they look at her and Ed and how close they are?

"Oh, uh, are you sure he won't mind I drank it?"

Without looking away from Ling, Lan Fan wordlessly puts up her hand and Winry hands her back the flask. Lan Fan tears her eyes away at last and smiles up at Winry, a real full smile this time, "He looks like he's had enough, don't you think?"

As if right on cue, Ling falls off the couch he had been doing his Roy impression on and nails his head on the coffee table.

Winry laughs, "Yeah... you might want to go help-."

Lan Fan is already on the way over before Winry finishes the sentence, leaving her standing alone, again. She doesn't want to feel sorry for herself, Winry is not the type of person that wants any pity, but she can feel tears picking at the back of her eyes and she aggressively wipes at them in order to stave them off. There is no way she is going to be the girl who cries in the bathroom at the party.

Thankfully, in a spot of good luck after the torrent of shit she has encountered thus far, she notices a friend of hers from her bot battling competitions standing upstairs. He doesn't typically battle bots but he is particularly gifted with radios and makes an excellent commentator during competitions. Everyone calls him by his last name, Fuery, and he waves her over as soon as they catch each other's eyes. 

"Hey Winry! I didn't know you were here!" Fuery pulls her into a one-armed hug and she's so overwhelmed with gratitude she's afraid she might almost start crying again.

"Yeah, you know my best friends Al and Ed? Well Al apparently met this guy Havoc who owns this house and so he invited us to this party. Small world right?"

Fuery looks at the other two guys with him, and then the three bust out into laughter. Winry wonders what she could have possibly screwed up now.

"What? Is something funny?" She says, allowing a bit of venom to seep into her voice.

"No... No Win, we aren't laughing at you." Fuery chuckles, squeezing her shoulder reassuringly, "You are right though, the world is indeed small because I live here, and so do these two-- we're Havoc's roommates."

Winry stares around blankly before being overcome with laughter herself.

"Oh god... _these_ are your roommates?" She makes eye contact with Fuery and shares a mischievous smile, "Like from that one story, or that other story you told last week at the competition..." She trails off, hoping Fuery catches on to her ruse quick enough to play along

Fuery looks at her curiously, understanding slowly dawning on his face as he realizes where she's going with this, and he rewards her efforts with a smile to match her own, "Oh yeah, the very ones. That one is Breda, and that one is Falman."

Winry looks at the both of them, making contemplative noises.

"Hmmm..." She points at Breda, who looks slightly nervous at this point, she elbows Fuery and stage whispers in his ear, "He's the guy from the first story, isn't he?"

"Oh yeah." Fuery whispers back loudly. "Falman was the other guy involved as well."

Winry widens her eyes and looks Falman up in down. He's exchanging glances with Breda and they both look like they're sweating bullets. Fuery must have some serious dirt on them, not that Winry actually knows any of it-- but all those theater classes she was forced to take in middle school seem to be paying off.

"Wow... wouldn't have pegged him as that type of guy..." She says with a wince, Falman begins to look truly distraught.

"It's always the quiet ones" Fuery says, shaking his head sadly.

"I don't know what he told you but he was lying!" Breda finally says, WInry knew he'd be the first to break.

Fuery raises a single hand to his mouth and gives a gentle gasp, "I would never lie, Breda! How dare you!"

Winry feels herself start to giggle and all it takes is a sideways glance from Fuery before the two break down into conspiratorial laughter. At this point Breda looks angry enough that he might actually pick a fight with Fuery.

Falman narrows his eyes suspiciously "Wait a minute, Breda. This asshole didn't tell her shit, she was taking us for a ride."

"I- what?" Breda says slowly, switching from anger to passivity in a matter of seconds.

Winry snickers and offers up her hand to Falman and then to Breda.

"My name is Winry, nice to meet you." She then adds with a shit-eating grin, "I've heard absolutely nothing about you."

Falman and Breda smile before good-naturedly punching Fuery in he shoulder.

"Ouch! I need those!" Fuery says in mock indignation. The four of them dissolve into giggles and Winry thinks for the first time since arriving at this horrible party that she's actually happy to be here.

That's when she notices Ed, quickly making his way up the stairs and actually by himself for once. She's in a much better mood now and it seems like this is finally her chance to pull him aside and have the moment she'd been wanting to have all night long.

"Ed!" She shouts, excusing herself from the guys and making her way over to Ed before he runs off again.

She notices Ed's shoulders tense so she knows he must have heard her, but he makes no effort to even lift her head in his direction. If anything it looks like starts walking even faster to get away from her. She starts to feel angry now, legitimately angry. How dare he act like he doesn't even notice her, after she's spent the whole party being shuffled from one person to the other while he chugs beers with Paninya.

"Ed!" She repeats again, annoyed with the tone of hurt she can detect in her own voice. Isn't that just great? "Ed?" She repeats, "Ed- talk to me!"

Ed still doesn't turn around as he aggressively shakes the doorknob to some door, and Winry's had it up to _here_ with his bullshit. She grabs his shoulder and forces him to turn around and face her like a goddamn adult.

"What the hell is your problem, Ed?" She spits out at him, "Some of my friends from battle bots are here, I've been trying to introduce you but you've been chugging beers with my roommate all night." She doesn't care if she sounds bitter or needy anymore. Something in the way Ed is looking at her with such obvious anger despite the fact  _she_ is the one that should be angry not  _him_ sets her off and she wishes he would give her something, anything, even if it's just more anger-- at least that would be an emotion in her direction instead of the neglect she's been subjected to all evening.

"I'm a bit busy Winry, can you take a hike?" He says in an even tone, but the calm facade is broken when he turns back to pound loudly on the door.

"Oi! Hurry up in there!"

The occupant pounds back and Ed raises his hand to hit the door again when Winry stops him.

"Ed can you open your eyes for once and realize I've been trying to spend time with you all night!" She finally shouts, her walls finally crumbling as she feels the true weight of disappointment that has been this entire evening.

Ed whirls back on her, the look on his face is so vicious she can feel her cheeks flush with the intensity of his gaze and she momentarily wonders if something had set him off prior to coming up the stairs.

"Oh I don't know, Winry, can you open your eyes instead of your mouth for once and realize _now is not the time!_ "

Winry stares in shock, Ed is shouting at her now and the anger in his face feels like salt in all the wounds she's accumulated tonight. The tears that havs been building up finally spill forward and she feels a sick sense of pride as Ed's face immediately twists into a mask of guilt.

'I mean... jesus fuck, I'm sorry Winry-" The tears start to roll and she feels equally embarrassed and relieved that she's letting them out after pretending she hasn't been upset all night, lying like this is exhausting.

Ed stutters so much it's obvious he feels bad as hell, but Winry isn't feeling too sympathetic. " Can-can't you like, go hang with Alphonse or something?" He offers lamely, "I'm sick, I- I just need into the bathroom- I'm sor-"

The bathroom finally opens and Ed immediately falls and stumbles into the arms of the person exiting it.

"In that much of a hurry to get in?" Says the man who had been in what Winry now realizes is the bathroom. He's tall, or maybe he's just taller than Ed. Either way he is noticeably older, with dark hair pulled back into a slick ponytail and a smile that reminds Winry of when cats yawn and you can see all their teeth.

"Just- just let me the fuck in." Ed mumbles, shoving the guy away and slamming the door to the bathroom.

Winry feels numb as she realizes that Ed has ditched her again tonight, and this time he left her crying alone outside of a bathroom. Maybe she was deluding herself by thinking he'd ever hold any interest in her after all.

"You alright doll?" Says the man who just excited the bathroom, a look of concern painted on his face. 

"I, uh... yeah." She wipes at her eyes furiously.

"Hey, don't do that." The man says, "you'll get wrinkles all over that pretty face, here." He hands her a handkerchief.

She feels a bit irked by his choice of phrasing but any kindness at this point will do, so she mumbles a thanks and pats her eyes dry with the cloth, which is a startling shade of scarlet.

"I'm Winry." She says with a shy smile as she offers back the handkerchief, unsure what the standard protocol is when you are offered such things from strangers at a college house party.

Clasping her out-stretched hand he gently kisses her knuckles.

"Call me Kimblee." He says smoothly, offering up the widest smile she's ever seen.

"Is that your first name?" She asks.

"It's my last." 

"Jeez, does everyone go by their last name around here?"

Kimblee chuckles, "Welcome to Amestris." He gestures around the room. "You're new here, aren't you?"

"Yeah... I'm a freshman." She says cautiously.

He widens his smile, which she honestly didn't think was possible.

"How about I get you a drink?"

She glances behind him to see if Fuery is still there with Breda and Falman, but it looks like they're downstairs. What the hell, after what happened with Ed she could use more alcohol.

She offers up a smile of her own, "Sure, I'd be glad to." Kimblee offers her his arm and they walk down the stairs. Winry briefly wonders if Ed is okay since he's been in the bathroom for so long, but quickly shoves the thought out of her mind.

He can stay in their for the rest of the party, for all she cared.

\---

 

 "Are your pants made of cotton... they look like sweatpants."

"Dude, they're pajoggers."

"...page hoggers?"

"No, pajoggers. Like  _pajamas_ and _joggers."_

Ed thinks he must simply be hallucinating at this point, because as he walks up to his brother and the exchange students named Lang and Ling Fan, or something-- fuck if he knows, they appear to be having a conversation about pajamas. But at this point Ed _also_ thinks it would be too much of a mercy for him to be hallucinating because if there is a god he's an asshole so unfortunately, everything he's hearing and seeing is probably real. His hand feels heavy and he looks down to see that at some point he must have acquired a bottle of vodka, because he's currently holding one. Fucking sweet, he thinks as he takes a healthy gulp of it. Real fucking sweet, just like this whole night. He is _totally_ still having a _great_ fucking time, god damn it.

"You're wearing pajamas at a party?" Ed asks Ling as a way of butting into the conversation.

Ling rolls his eyes, or the room rolls Ling, Ed can't tell anymore.

"No, I wore  _pajoggers_ to a party-- check out this impressive range of motion."

And with that Ling promptly sticks his leg up nearly vertically along the adjacent wall, and Lan Fan solemnly claps. Ed has never seen someone look so smug about their flexibility before.

"Yeah, man, you stuck that leggy up real far."

Ohmyfuckinggodwhatdidhejustsay?! He hopes Ling and Lan Fan missed that, but based off their expressions it seems he is again, not going to be so lucky. If he ever meets god he's gonna kick that guy's dick in.

"Ed, can I have a word with you?"

Ed turns around to see Winry looking at him... or around him? Man, he is dizzy. He should probably lay off the vodka. So naturally, in order to bide time before he has to answer Winry, he drinks more vodka. This is a volatile social situation, he is sure at this point both he and Winry are beyond intoxicated and he has most definitely already said some things he regrets. That means that whatever he says now is going to need to be carefully crafted, he needs to show some tact. Finesse. Social awareness. All that.

"Oh, mister pony-tail is done sweet talking you, I see" He says over his shoulder with a smirk.

Real smooth, Elric. 

Winry shoots him a glare so livid he immediately regrets everything down to the day he was conceived, but he's already so fucked at this point he might as well go for broke.

"Come outside with me, Ed." She says in a voice like steel-cut glass.

"Excuse me." Ed mumbles to Al, Ling and Lan fan stopped paying attention a long time ago, he follows Winry's already retreating back through the kitchen and out the front door. After the heat and noise of the party the cool night air hits him with such intensity he vaguely wonders if he's gonna throw up all over Havoc's front steps. His vision goes a bit blurry as his eyes tear up at the sudden temperature change, WInry waits with arms crossed at the bottom of the stoop looking off into the distance. She must be cold in that skirt.

"You cold?" Ed asks quietly, he feels slightly more sober now that he's out of the party atmosphere.

"No." Winry says, even though she shivers slightly. She doesn't bother turning to look at him but he can tell by the cut of her jaw she's still mad as all hell, he feels about two inches tall now that he's alone with her face-to-face. God, he's really screwed this up.

"Here... just take it. I don't want you to freeze to death just cause your pissed at me" He says gruffly, taking off his jacket and throwing it at Winry.

She turns in surprise as the jacket lands on her head, "I don't want your stupid jacket!" she says angrily as she throws it back at Ed, he's taken aback by the amount of fury that's crept into her voice. He knows he acted like a dick but why is she this worked up about it? He said some shit that one time in front of the bathroom but to be honest, he hardly remembers what the conversation was about and he knows for a fact he's hardly seen her the rest of the night-- so he has no idea what else he could have done to set her off so bad.

"Jeez, Win, I'm sorry-- okay? I know I acted like an asshole in front of the bathroom-"

Winry scoffs, "Oh Yeah, _just_ in front of the bathroom..." 

Ed has no idea what that's about, so he continues on like she didn't interrupt him.

"yeah, in front of the bathroom, and anyway I'm drunk as shit right now--"

"You've been drunk as shit all night" She mumbles, rubbing her arms with an obvious chill. Why the _fuck_ is she being so stubborn? Just looking at her is starting to make  _him_ cold.

"Yeah, okay fair," He continues, "So how about we just let this go for now and you can kick my ass for it later when I'll actually remember-- oh my god,  _will you just take the god damn jacket!_ " He finally snaps, throwing the jacket back at her.  _Why_ is she looking at him so angrily, w _hy_ is she shaking so much, w _hy_  won't she just admit she's cold, and _why_ won't she just put the jacket on _for fuck's sake!_

The jacket falls in between the two of them as they both refuse to either break eye contact or pick it up, he doesn't know what's going on anymore but he feels like this is some sort of test that he's failing miserably. After a few awkward moments of silence where the only sound Ed hears is the clenching and unclenching of his jaw, he finally decides to be the bigger man and reaches forward to pick the jacket up. He slowly bends down and, thanks to his fake leg, he has to completely fall to one knee like he's praying in the gravel and dirt. As his head bows he hears Winry whisper above him in a voice so soft he wonders if he's hearing things.

"That guy... he asked me out on a date."

Ed can feel himself flinch, he suddenly feels very vulnerable in a position like this and in his hurry to stand up he places his foot wrong and feels the socket of his knee twist in the prosthetic, and he promptly stumbles forward. WInry catches him and asks if he's alright but his cheeks are burning with shame and embarrassment and he shoves her off as quickly as he fell into her arms. Look at him, he can't walk or stand or do  _anything_ right but college hasn't even started yet and Winry is already getting asked on dates! Where does that leave him? It's just like the kids said at school, Winry has been wasting her time with him since day one and he deluded himself by thinking for one second that she'd stay by his side through college as well, he was lucky enough she gave him the time of day in high school. Now... now there were older guys, whole guys, who could still run track and walk around without needing her as a crutch, who weren't already a year behind in school and several inches below average in height. Who-- ah, forget it. Who gives a shit?

"I'm- I'm fine." He says softly, then coughs, "I mean, it just took me by surprise is all, you didn't seem like the type to hook up with a guy so quickly, but hey! That's college isn't it? One second you've never so much as held hands with someone and the next you're going out to his place and, who knows! Fucking good for _you_ Winry, I'll go ahead and hop on inside and tell Al we better not wait up!" As Winry's face grows colder with every word he hates himself more and more, like blood pouring out of an open wound he heaps all his insecurities onto Winry. He knows it's not fair, of fucking course it's not fair, and he doesn't mean a single word he's saying-- but he doesn't know what else to do, he never has.

Winry stares at him blankly, and he gets the distinct feeling she sees right through his ruse. He feels naked, and not just because he doesn't have his jacket on.

"Why are you so upset I'm going on a single date, Ed?" She asks, her voice as still as the night air- stifling and oppressive.

Ed is the one who shivers now. "I'm not upset." He says, ya know, like a liar. She rolls her eyes and asks him again.

"Why are you so upset? Think about it, Edward. I want you to  _really_ think about it. Think about why you might be upset I'm going on a date, then think about why I might pull you aside to  _ask you_ before I go on the date. Use that super observant mind of yours that can solve an equation no problem and apply it to this real world situation, think."

Ed stares at her blankly. He was expecting her to be angry, maybe shove him a bit, cuss him out-- not this. Not this super impassive voice and strange questioning, he knows why he's upset, right? Cause of his own shit, nothing to do with her. Nothing at all, he just wants her around, is all. Cause he cares about her a lot, like a whole lot. He cares about her as much as he cares about Alphonse. Is that what she wants to hear? Does she want to know that just so she can lord it over him later? Have some knife she can dig into his ribs, kick him while he's down? Fuck this, fuck everything about this.

"God, Winry, I don't fucking know, it's just weird!" He shouts, "To think about you like that, is all--"

"But why!" She shouts back, "Why, Ed! Why is that weird?"

Because I love you, he thinks, knowing the answer.

"Because... because you're like my fucking sister!" He answers, knowing immediately that was the wrong choice but not knowing what else to say, not to her, not now, not like this.

She stares at him like he just grew an extra head, a really ugly head that she wants to chop off and throw into a fire-- or maybe that's just how she feels about him.

"... Okay." She finally responds, a manic smile plastered on to her face. "Great, just great. How about a double date, then? If that's all that's bothering you! You can fulfill your brotherly duties by watching out for me-- just you, me, Kimblee, and Paninya."

Ed slaps on a smile fake enough to match her own, this is fine. So fine. fine fine fine.

"Of course that would be okay!" He says through gritted teeth.

If by okay you mean  _absolute hell!_ He thinks to himself, wondering if either of their faces will crack from the effort.

"Great!"

"Fine!"

"Super!

"Neat!"

"fucking  _fantastic_!" Winry shouts out shrilly, she throws her hands up and stomps away up the steps to the house, slams the door, and leaves Ed alone standing in the cold. His shoulders slump, he looks up at the light-polluted sky and wonders if there is a god, and if there is-- why he is such a fucking asshole. He spits on the ground, and points up menacingly at the sky.

"Fuck you." He says aloud, and with that, he wanders back into the party.


	3. Nothing But the Ground Left for You to Fall To

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amazing: two people cried in this college student's room on the same day. Watch her awkwardly try to comfort them both.
> 
> Or, The One Where Roy's Hubris Almost Gets Him Killed and Winry Deserves Better

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is, as per usual, from the Mountain Goats, this time from "Fall of the Star High School Running Back"

Sometimes, Roy is even amazed at his own pretentiousness, because when he wakes up Sunday morning, his first thought is: _In the wise words of Sufjan Stevens, “I made a lot of mistakes.”_ His head is pounding, his mouth tastes like stomach acid and sadness, and his phone is buzzing forlornly on the floor, clacking loudly against the closed top of his record player. It sounds like his phone is buzzing inside of his skull, and he’s ready to crawl over to it and chuck it against a wall to make it stop when he hears Riza from the kitchen say “I made coffee.”

Sometimes, Roy is amazed that Riza Hawkeye, literal saint and angel of mercy, is friends with him, complete and utter trash, and is willing to pity him in his hour of need.

“Bless you,” he mumbles, face-down on what he only realizes then is Wall Mattress.

Technically, Wall Mattress belongs to Fuery. Upon his moving into Central, he made a passing comment to his mother that Havoc only used a futon and didn’t have a bed, at which point she foisted a spare mattress onto him.

“Doesn’t your friend want a real bed?” Fuery’s mother asked.

“I’m afraid not,” Fuery responded, recollecting a similar conversation he had had with his future roommate.

“Nah, man, chicks love futons,” Havoc had said. And then, with a lascivious eyebrow wiggle, he had added “Plus, when you’re doing it, the bed won’t squeak, so I won’t keep you awake at night. Those floors are really thin, man.”

They are, indeed, really thin, but lucky for Fuery, Havoc has never successfully brought a girl home, as far as he knows, so it’s never been an issue.

But Fuery’s mom had insisted on giving them the mattress regardless, certain that Havoc would change his mind. And so, having nowhere else to put it, they stuck it behind their singular couch until they figured out a way to get rid of it.

Unfortunately, they never did get rid of it, and at a certain point it just became a fixture of their living room, like the inflatable alligator that Havoc had bought as a joke on a trip they had taken to Florida over the summer and named Cinnamon, and a traffic cone that Breda stole from a parking structure in a city to the north of their school. Wall Mattress just became Wall Mattress, and eventually they stopped noticing it was there. But Wall Mattress was always _Wall_ Mattress, which does not explain how Roy is currently laying on it, because as much as he feels like the world is pitching to and fro, he is mostly sure that he’s not against a wall.

“How did Wall Mattress get down here?” Roy asks, sitting up and immediately regretting it. He feels like he’s being bludgeoned upside the head with the empty bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon that is sitting on the breakfast bar, like some kind of token of his shame.

Riza comes over from the kitchen, handing him coffee. It’s in a pastel mug that says “Baby” on the side, but Roy doesn’t really care. He honestly isn’t sure where or why his friends own this mug, and he _still_ doesn’t care, because underneath the amaretto creamer that Falman keeps in their fridge just for him (because Falman is _nice_ and _considerate_ ), there is definitely coffee, and soon he will feel like a person again, and not like the human personification of I Fucked Up.

Riza’s mug is yellow and simple and somehow suits her despite not belonging to her, like maybe someone bought it for her and just put it on Central’s mug rack. She sits down on Wall Mattress next to him and crosses her legs underneath herself. Roy recognizes the Steely Dan shirt and plaid sleep pants she’s wearing as belonging to Havoc, and he feels like he’s going to throw up, so he drinks some coffee.

“Once everybody left last night, you said you needed to go to bed, but you just kept yelling ‘I’m too good to sleep on a couch, Riza,’ and so you made me wrestle Wall Mattress out from behind the couch.”

Roy wants to die. He is convinced, though, that he is too filthy of a sinner to be allowed the sweet, sweet release of death, and so he must suffer.

“God, I’m sorry.” He’s still in the clothes he had worn the night before, and he smells like a vodka distillery. He isn’t sure that he’d be able to survive the walk back to his dorm reeking of bad decisions, and so he debates on what’s worse: smelling like a liquor store, or smelling like Havoc’s shitty Old Spice shower gel. “And, um.” He wraps his fingers around the mug, relishing the warmth even though it’s still middle-of-the-summer hot and muggy outside, and inside of Central it isn’t much better. “I’m sorry for not exactly being the best friend last night. I should’ve stuck with you more.”

She shrugs, the neck of Havoc’s shirt slipping over one of her shoulders. There are freckles there that he’s never noticed before, and for some reason his palms start to sweat. That’s a hangover symptom he’s never encountered before, and he wipes one of his hands on the leg of his jeans. “It’s no big deal,” she says smoothly. “I got to hang out with Winry and Al. Well, before Winry got picked up by Kimblee.”

Roy grimaces. “Oh my god, _Kimblee?_ Kimblee was here?”

Riza manages to look slightly surprised. “What? You don’t remember?”

Before Roy can ask for clarification, Breda stumbles up the stairs of the basement, where his and Falman’s rooms are. “You guys. I’m dead. Can we get brunch?”

Roy looks to Riza and she shrugs again, Havoc’s shirt slipping even more dangerously over her shoulder to the point where he can see the place where her arm and shoulder meet. He reaches over delicately, straightening it up. She looks over to him, not answering his question. It’s not unusual for Riza to be silent. She has a quiet disposition until you get her on a roll (usually about misogyny or Roy procrastinating on his schoolwork), but that’s mainly because she bides her time, carefully constructing her points before she says them. But very rarely is she ever at a loss for words.

“ _Guys_ ,” Breda moans from where he is still laying on the stairs. “Seriously, my stomach is starting to consume itself, can we go?”

“Uh, yeah,” Riza says, straightening her spine. Riza isn’t given to filler words like “uh.” She must be hungover, Roy thinks. His brain’s more than a little fuzzy, so he can understand. “I’ll go change. You guys wrangle the crew.”

It takes an act of God to get all of their friends somewhere at the same time, particularly since Havoc is notorious for taking forever to get ready, but the promise of brunch is enough to get their asses into gear.

Shame brunch is a time-honored tradition among the Central crew. There’s a tiny, local brunch place right next to Amestris’s campus, and so freshman year, they started the habit of stumbling there on Sunday mornings hungover after their weekends spent drinking. The place is minuscule and constantly packed, but has the best brunch in town, and so it’s always worth waiting in line to get a table.

The only thing is, Roy must be more hungover than he thought, because not only are his palms weirdly sweaty and his head horribly achy, but he’s also seeing things, because how else in the hell could he explain Ling and the girl who rescued Purrseidon sitting at one of the long communal tables? How would they even know it’s there? Didn’t Ling just move here from another country? How could he possibly already know about all the city’s hip and happening brunch places?

“Hey! Roomie!”

Wait, nope, not a hallucination. He’s definitely really there, and also holding a mimosa in his hand, despite the fact that, as far as Roy knows, he's nineteen. He has many questions.

“Yo, that’s your roommate, right?” Havoc asks, holding the number for their table in hand.

“Yup,” Roy answers.

“Do you want to sit with him?” Havoc whispers.

Ling is smiling too brightly for it to be this early in the morning, although that may be helped by the champagne in that mimosa, but the girl he’s with is staring daggers at them like she hears what they’re saying.

“I don’t think we have a choice,” Roy says, grabbing the number from Havoc and walking over to where Ling is sitting. “You mind if we sit here?” Roy asks.

“Of course not, Colonel!”

Roy grits his teeth. Now is really not the time. Roy places the table number onto the metal number-holder and sits down in his seat heavily. Riza sits next to him, gingerly placing the French press they’re going to split, as is tradition, in the space between them.

“Hi, Lan Fan,” Riza says, and waves at the girl, who actually waves back at her. Roy is stunned, both at the fact that Riza knows the girl’s name, and at the fact that this is the most reaction he’s ever seen someone get out of the girl, who apparently is named Lan Fan, before. “Did you have a good time at the party last night?”

Lan Fan shoots a glance at Ling across the table and says “Keeping an eye on him is a lot of work.”

Riza chuckles, pressing the plunger down on the press pot and pouring Roy a cup, setting it in front of him. “Yeah, I can understand that.”

“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?” Roy asks, only to be interrupted by his phone buzzing angrily on the formica of the table. He groans, dropping his head onto his arms. “Leave me _alone_.”

“Bro, your phone’s going crazy,” Ling says, munching loudly on a pineapple slice that had been skewered on an ornamental toothpick in his mimosa. “What’s going on?”

Riza snickers as she sips from her coffee. Like many things about her, Roy will never understand how she can drink the stuff without any cream or sugar. French press coffee tastes like sludge on its own, and after two cups, once you get down to the dregs, he can’t drink it anymore. He swears that Riza would eat the grounds out from the bottom with a spoon.

“Yeah, Colonel, what’s going on?” Riza asks, nudging the small pot of cream over to his folded arms with her knuckles.

He’s glad that at least someone can gain some happiness from his suffering. “When I was drunk last night, I messaged a bunch of girls on Tinder.”

“How many is a bunch?” Ling asks.

“Approximately a hundred and fifty,” Riza answers.

“Holy _fuck_ , roomie!” Ling exclaims. “But that doesn’t explain why they’re all messaging you. No offense or anything, but the women of Tinder are a fickle breed. How many of them messaged you back?”

Roy lifts his head from his arms and looks morosely at his coffee, steaming menacingly next to the pot of half and half. “All of them.”

Ling gapes. “Dude, again, no offense, but no fucking way.” Roy simply nods. He isn’t sure what he did to deserve this, but now his phone won’t stop buzzing, and it’s giving him a migraine, as well as making it absurdly difficult to wade through his notifications to get to the NPR app so that he can look at All Songs Considered. “What’s on your Tinder profile? Promises of political power? Networking opportunities? Immortality?”

Roy slides the phone over to Ling. “Look at it for yourself.”

Ling does so, opening up the app and bringing up Roy’s profile. “‘Roy, twenty-one, bitrate snob,’” he reads.

Roy flushes and reaches for his phone. “Hey, Ling, don’t read it out--”

“‘How strange it is to be anything at all,’” Ling reads. “Bro, what the fuck does that mean?”

“It’s a Neutral Milk Hotel song lyric, now give me back my phone!” Roy grasps for it, only for a foot to lock around his ankle under the table and pull his whole body to the side in his chair. Confused, he looks up to see Lan Fan slumped down in her chair, and when he checks under the table, he sees a small, black Vibram shoe (the ones that look like gloves for your feet, Roy thinks) holding his foot to floor of the restaurant.

“Okay,” Ling says, somehow unfazed by the fact that Lan Fan has Roy pinned under the table. “So, clearly these girls aren’t into you because of your bio. What’s in your pictures?” Roy watches in horror as Ling begins to scroll through his pictures. Since the pictures are linked to his Facebook, there’s nothing hugely interesting on there: his official RA headshot, a picture of him at a Father John Misty concert, one of him crossing the finish line of a 5k, one of him speaking at a model UN conference the spring before, one of him at one of the city’s many local coffee joints with an artfully photographed cortado, and--

“Holy _fuck_ , dude! Ballsy!” Ling squeals.

“What?” Roy asks, terrified.

“You posted that on Facebook? Aren’t you, like, friends with your mom and stuff?”

Roy remembers the sixth picture on his Tinder profile. It’s a silly picture of him dressed as Karl Marx, complete with a shitty fake beard, from Halloween the year before. Yeah, it’s a bad picture, but there’s no reason for Ling to sound so scandalized.

“Well, I mean, yeah, but it’s just a Halloween picture!”

Ling opens his eyes to look at Roy with what he can only deem as the kind of pity one must exhibit at an animal shelter, looking at a puppy with a missing leg. “Uh oh, pal buddy.”

He hands the phone back to Roy, and Roy can feel Lan Fan’s foot being lifted off of his as he lifts the phone to his eyes with a shaking hand.

“Oh my god,” Roy whispers.

Riza peers over his shoulder to see a picture of Roy taken in what appears to be Breda and Falman’s bathroom mirror, but only from the neck down. His shirt is gone, and his bare torso is on full display for all of Tinder and also, apparently, all of Facebook as well.

“I see now why you got all those messages!” Ling chirps. “Where’ve you been hiding those abs, roomie? Is that why you always change in the bathroom? You like to keep them a surprise? Well, color me surprised! I figured you had to be some spindly little dude under all those layers. I mean, why else would you wear a flannel in the summer? That doesn’t make any sense!”

Ling continues to babble on about what a surprise it is that Roy has abs (which, to be honest, kind of offends him, because aside from the smoking and the drinking and the not sleeping regularly and the crippling stress and fear of his impending graduation and the GRE and applying to graduate school, he actually takes his fitness very seriously), but Roy’s hearing has burbled off into white noise. He thinks he might faint, honestly.

The sound of metal connecting with porcelain brings him back to reality, and he sees Riza pouring cream into his coffee and stirring. The steam has abated, which is good, because (and he’ll never admit this to anybody except for Riza) he is notorious for burning his tongue on hot beverages. Ling is still talking, but Riza gives him a small, rare smile. He gets them more often than most people, but all of Riza’s smiles feel like little secrets, something private and good to keep to yourself. He smiles back at her and raises the coffee to his lips.

 _This is fine_ , he thinks, _and definitely not the end of the world_. He’ll just take the picture down off of Facebook, and then it’ll be down from Tinder, and then none of these girls will ever want to talk to him again. Or, no, you know what? He hasn’t been on a date in...well, in a really, hilariously long time. Maybe he can take this opportunity to get out a little, to meet some new people. Unwind.

He looks at Riza, who is placidly drinking her coffee and rolling her eyes at a crude joke from Havoc and Breda.

With someone like Riza Hawkeye watching his back, he knows that he’ll be fine.

* * *

 Roy inhales deeply. There really is nothing like the first day of school to lift one’s spirits. It’s done the trick for Roy ever since he was a kid, and it still works now. Sure, his eyes are red and puffy from his phone buzzing all night with messages from Tinder girls, but other than that, he feels amazing. And he will showcase exactly _how_ amazing he feels by dominating every member of their graduating class in the Lifetime Fitness pre-test.

Lifetime Fitness is one Amestris’s more quirky graduation requirements. For all intents and purposes, it’s a glorified gym class, but unlike your run of the mill gym class, you can _win_. Not really, there’s no prize or anything, but in the 1.5 mile run-walk test to gauge your cardiorespiratory endurance, you can finish first, and that’s all that matters.

Somehow, though, he’s the only person who’s excited about this.

“Mustang,” Havoc mumbles. He’s got five o’clock shadow despite it being 10:30 in the morning, and is in a pair of grey sweatpants that Roy’s pretty sure have been with him since high school. “For once, could you just like...not?”

 _That_ , Roy thinks, _is the true difference between real seniors and super seniors_. Real seniors, while tired, are filled with determination at the thought of graduating. Super seniors have been beaten down too many times by the system, and now can no longer take in the simple joy of a 1.5 mile jog.

“Yeah, Mustang, your cheer is frankly disturbing,” Breda says, hastily eating a breakfast sandwich from the campus café as they walk to the fitness complex. “I thought that seniors were supposed to cynical. Get with the program, Mustang.”

“I _am_ cynical,” Roy protests. “I’m the world’s biggest cynic!”

“Yeah,” Fuery chimes in. “That’s totally why you lose all your country’s money in your UN thing by sending other countries humanitarian aid.”

“Fuery, come on--”

“Mustang,” Falman says, opening the door of the fitness complex. “You’ve played a lawful good paladin in every D&D campaign we’ve ever done. Face it; you’re a cinnamon roll.”

“I’m a what?” Roy asks, walking into the building.

Riza sneaks in right before the door closes. “Are you guys calling Roy a cinnamon roll?”

“Yeah!” Falman says.

Riza nods and says, cryptically, “Lawful good cinnamon roll.”

“Okay, now you’re just saying words,” Roy replies.

“Come on,” Riza says, walking in front of him. “We need to go take that test.”

Their Lifetime Fitness instructor, Alex Louis Armstrong, is notorious across Amestris’s campus for being both overly enthusiastic about fitness and for being huge. Both of these stereotypes are confirmed upon meeting him up on the track, where he towers a full foot over even the tallest members of their graduating class. He practically sparkles with joy at the thought of guiding these soon-to-be graduates in the finer points of fitness, which, frankly, Roy couldn’t care less about. He’s been wound tight as a bedspring for days, even before move-in day and the resulting fiascos. He had gone back to stay with his foster mother over the summer, and Riza had gone back to stay with her grandfather, meaning that whenever he wanted to see any of his friends he had to drive all the way into the city. He had been working a high-stress internship at the courthouse of his mom’s city, and yet, for some reason, expected the school year to be a welcome reprieve.

He was, of course, mistaken.

All that tension, building for months and crystallizing over the last few days, has been coiling in his muscles, and he bounces on the balls of his feet, waiting for Armstrong to give them the okay to run. He’s got Kendrick Lamar’s _To Pimp a Butterfly_ cued up on his iPod Classic, and he’s ready to go.

When they’re finally given the signal, Roy sprints. Fuck jogging. He jogs every Saturday and Sunday morning (with the exception of this past weekend, obviously, when he was indisposed). Right now, he wants to run until he either finishes, throws up, or his legs give out, whatever comes first.

He laps everyone else in his class, including all of his friends. Havoc is jogging weakly, stopping every minute or so to cough, while Breda and Falman are both walking in solidarity with each other. Fuery is doing pretty well, but keeps stopping to change tracks on his iPod. He can’t seem to find Riza, though, which is odd. He knows she’s here, so she can’t have just disappeared.

He catches a flash of blonde out of the corner of his right eye and realizes that the reason he hadn’t seen Riza was because she was directly behind him, but had picked up pace to be next to him. She flashes him a smile and he returns it, popping out an ear-bud.

“Race you,” he calls.

She laughs, a full-throated laugh, the kind you don’t normally get out of her. “The loser buys coffee.”

For Roy, who only likes coffee beverages that are in the five-dollar-and-up price bracket, these are fighting words, and so he picks up pace. But every time he does so, Riza matches him. She’s not hugely tall (though neither, really, is he), but her legs are deceptively long, and in the shorts she’s wearing, it’s hard to ignore that, particularly when he can’t seem to shake her.

He’s been counting the laps in his head, and as they near the end of the last lap, he buckles down, ready to win, but so does she.

They cross the finish line at the same time, panting and sweaty, a full lap ahead of the rest of their class.

“So...I think this means we each buy our own coffees,” Roy says between pants.

“That’s good,” Riza says, “because I can’t afford to buy the shit you drink. Who knew syrup was so expensive?”

“Hey! Don’t ruin my cred!” he says, watching her bend to drink from a water fountain.

She comes up, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Roy, I hate to break this to you, but you don’t have any cred.”

She begins to walk down the stairs from the track and he follows her, protesting “If I don’t, then neither do you!”

“I never claimed to have cred. Unlike some people, I actually have no desire to be cool.”

 _Which is exactly why you’re cool_ , Roy thinks. He doesn’t understand how anyone can be as comfortable in their skin as she is. It’s honestly kind of spooky; it’s like she never had an awkward phase, coming fully-formed into this world as the woman she is now like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. The only thing that’s changed about her over the years is her hair, and even then it’s only grown. Roy’s had to feel his way through to adulthood like stumbling through a dark room. He’s reasonably okay with the person he is now, but it still doesn’t feel entirely genuine. With Riza, what you see is what you get. She has nothing to hide. This baffles him.

He has enough time between Lifetime Fitness and his next class--Muslim Religious Traditions, taught by the scary religion professor with all the tattoos and the creepy, unexplained scar--for them both to drive out to their favorite coffee shop in town, the small one that lets people bring in their dogs.

Riza gets distracted by a Rottweiler lounging by the open door, which allows Roy to sneak up and order for the both of them--a medium dark roast for her, and some icy thing with amaretto syrup and whipped cream for him. Riza doesn’t like to talk about it, and Roy doubts he would know about it unless he had seen it first hand, but Riza’s financial situation isn’t great. He’s an RA mainly to beef up his CV for grad school applications, but she does it to cover her room and board. Her mother has been dead for a while, for at least as long as she’s known Roy, but her dad is an erstwhile politician who, on the heels of a political scandal that happened a few years before Roy met Riza, lost most of their money in lawsuits. She lives better on Amestris’s campus than she ever lived at home, but she still isn’t flushed with cash, and so Roy likes to do small things like this whenever he can, even though she always gets mad at him. This is what happens when you get two prideful assholes to be friends with each other. It becomes even more difficult to express authentic affection than it normally does between friends.

“You’re the worst,” she says, taking the coffee from him and glaring down the cute barista with the short-back-and-sides who is giving them a Meaningful Look from behind the counter. Roy knows that this means “thank you.”

“I know,” Roy says, grinning smugly. She knocks her shoulder against his as they walk out to the car.

It’s as they get into the car and Riza starts to complain about the college radio station he always plays (which, to be fair, is usually incomprehensibly obscure, and this afternoon is no different), that he is hit with the realization that this is the last first day of school they’ll ever have together. They haven’t talked much about their future plans in anything more concrete than that Roy is determined to rule the world, but he knows that Riza is planning on applying to graduate school, just like he is. They haven’t talked about where, but he’s already been looking at places. Faraway places, mainly, nowhere closer than a six hour drive north of here. He knows that his future should be his first priority, and it is, mostly, but part of him desperately wants to run the red light at the intersection that will lead them back to campus and just drive until they end up in Canada or somewhere, where they can hide in some fishing village where everyone speaks French and never have to worry about the future again, because there is no future in Canada. It’s like another dimension where time doesn’t move and everyone wears toboggans.

“Hey, Roy, the light’s green.”

“Oh right, sorry. Just spaced out a little there.”

But they can’t do that, because the world doesn’t work that way. And besides, despite all the jokes about her being his lieutenant, she’s got her own life to live. He’s got places to go, a world to rule as its benevolent dictator, and so he has to keep moving forward. Not to Canada, but out of his car and to class.

“Thanks for the coffee, asshole,” Riza says, stepping out of Roy’s car and into the parking lot.

“You’re welcome, I guess,” he replies, following her across the street to the academic side of campus.

Their campus is hilariously hilly, and so getting from one building to the other occasionally feels like you’re taking a guided tour through Machu Picchu. And particularly today of all days, after sprinting a mile and a half, Roy’s thighs really don’t want to climb any stairs.

“I hate this godforsaken school,” he huffs as they climb one of many sets of stairs. “I’m gonna burn it down.”

“Then they’ll really be asking for alumni donations after we graduate,” Riza says. The word “graduate” coming from her mouth makes something constrict in his gut. _It’s only the first day of school, Roy,_ he thinks _, get it together._ “They’ll have to rebuild the whole school.”

There is one more flight of stairs between him and the humanities building, and he knows he can make it, at which point his phone buzzes in his pocket. He grabs it, continuing to climb the stairs, to see a text from Ling that he will never get to read, because his feet had not quite caught up to his brain, and he promptly falls down the full flight of stairs, twisting his ankle, smashing the screen on his phone, and, to put a shit cherry on this shit sundae, spilling his coffee. That’s $5.50 down the drain. Or, he supposes, down the stairs.

* * *

Roy’s persona is like some kind of weird performance art piece, Riza thinks, both in its consistency and in its strangeness. Because, as far as she knows, everybody knows that he lives a carefully constructed series of lies, but he doesn’t know that they know. It’s at times like this, though, that she is forced to confront the divide between Roy Mustang, who lives under the delusion of being cool, and Roy, who just fell down a flight of stairs because he tried to answer a text message while walking.

Still though; even if Roy is some kind of bizarre anomaly, he’s still her best friend, and she can’t deny the surge of panic at seeing him tumble down a flight of concrete steps and into the plaza.

“Roy, hey, are you alright?” she asks, kneeling next to him. There are people walking past them and rubbernecking, part of the rush of students to class, and Riza has the absurd urge to shoot them. Gawking at other people’s pain is tacky.

He groans and says “I can’t believe I spilled my fucking coffee. That thing was six dollars.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m less concerned about your coffee than I am about your leg.” There’s a large, nasty-looking gash on Roy’s ankle, going up to his shin. “Do you think you can walk?”

“Well, let’s find out.” He sits up and manages to put weight on his uninjured leg, but when he tries to step on the other foot, he would have tumbled back to the ground if Riza hadn’t bolted upright and caught him. “No. The answer is no.”

“Alright,” she says, looping an arm around his waist. “Come on.”

She begins to steer him away from the humanities building, at which point he shouts “Hey! I have class!”

“Not today you don’t. We’re getting that ankle cleaned up.”

He fights her about it the entire way back to her dorm, but his arguments become more nonsensical as they go.

“I hear that if you miss the first day of class, you fail automatically,” he tells her.

“No you don’t. And we’ll e-mail your professor once we get in, okay?”

“He won’t fail me; he’ll actually just kill me. Have you ever seen him? He’s terrifying.”

“What is with you thinking that everyone is out to kill you?”

That ankle must really hurt, because by the time they get to her dorm, he seems slightly delirious.

She sets him down on her bed as gently as she can, and then goes to her suite’s bathroom to wet a towel to start to clean up his wound.

“I’m gonna bleed all over your bed,” he says, looking fairly pathetic with his banged up ankle, still clutching his busted phone.

She shrugs. “I have a uterus; it’s been bled on before.” The gash on his ankle is surprisingly deep, and he winces as she cleans it up. She tries her best to be gentle, but there are bits of dirt stuck in the cut that she needs to get out or it’ll get infected. After cleaning it, she elevates his foot on a couple of pillows and goes to get her first aid kit, an old RA standby. She wraps his ankle up as best she can, but it’s definitely sprained, and she tells him as much.

“No, come on, it can’t be! We just started Lifetime Fitness!”

“Yeah, and you just sprained your ankle. Life isn’t fair.”

He reaches out and slams his fist against her wall. She’s grateful that it’s the middle of the day and the girls on the other side of her probably aren’t there to have heard it.

“What a great fucking start to my senior year, yeah? I get into a fight with one of my residents over a cat, I get way too drunk at Havoc’s house party, and I sprained my fucking ankle.” His phone buzzes, but beneath all the cracks on the screen, whatever it was is unreadable. “At least now I don’t have to deal with having drunk-Tinder-messaged a bunch of girls I don’t know since I _can’t fucking use my phone_.”

He lets out a bitter laugh that sounds a bit like a sob. She looks away from the wound on his ankle to his face to find that it didn’t just sound like a sob, it was one.

“Oh, great!” he shouts through the tears in his throat. “And now I’m crying! This is fucking fantastic!”

Riza has never been a hugely maternal person. She is the last person any of their friends would go to for comfort (Havoc wins in that department; he’s basically everyone’s dad, and even though classic rock and light beer won’t solve most problems, his sheer enthusiasm and genuine concern do), which makes her being an RA even more bizarre. But she hates seeing her friends suffer as much as anyone else does, and so she does the only thing she can think to do.

“Do you want to hear something funny?” she asks.

“Yeah, sure, why not,” he says caustically.

“At that party at Havoc’s, Ling was doing an impression of you. Going on about res life policy, and download speeds, and PItchfork reviews, and then right before he was going to say something about you dressing like a TA, he fell and hit his head on the coffee table.” She had watched it happen, and, frankly, it was hilarious. The impression was good-natured, but a little too on the nose for comfort. She left out the part where Ling was entirely convinced that Roy is secretly gay, because now is honestly not the time.

And then, there it is. As high-strung as Roy is, whenever one of those strings snap, there’s still him underneath of it, and he manages a watery chuckle. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, but I guess his head is made of titanium, because he just got right back up.”

He looks over at her, eyes unusually unguarded for him. He’s not trying to accomplish anything with her. “What else happened? I honestly don’t remember much of it.”

“You got into a fight with Ed over an empty wine bottle for some reason. I’m not entirely sure why. And Ed got into a drinking contest with Paninya, and a beer-tasting contest with Havoc, and a fight with Winry. He was pretty busy.”

“Did he get punched?” Roy asks hopefully.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Damn.”

It’s a little bit like telling a small child a bedtime story, except the small child is her twenty-one-year-old best friend, and the story includes a lot of alcohol, drugs, and people making questionable sexual choices. But tales of how his drunken antics were, honestly, fairly low-tier in comparison with some of the other things that happened at Central is enough to lift his mood a fraction.

“I’m really sorry, Riza,” he says, staring at the ceiling. “I’ve been a complete ass for the last few days, and you really don’t deserve me bleeding _and_ crying on your bed.”

“It’s fine, Roy,” she says. “You’ve been a complete ass your whole life, so this is really no trouble at all.”

He laughs, swatting at her from his prone position. “What a fantastic image you’re getting of our graduating class’s valedictorian.”

“You don’t know that you’re going to be valedictorian,” she reminds him, at which point he gives her one of his trademark smug grins, the ones that make all the freshman girls weak in the knees, and that (as much as Ling is loath to admit it) got him all those matches on Tinder. Riza would be lying if she said that Roy wasn’t attractive, and, even worse than that, he’s charismatic. Roy could convince their friends to follow him into war if he wanted to. She gets to see a side of him that none of those freshman girls and none of those people on Tinder get to see, and so only she truly knows that under the nice clothes and good music taste and 4.0 and stupid haircut and ambitions that are a little too unreasonably big, Roy Mustang is a complete fucking mess.

He looks up at her, grinning. “Yes I do.”

And yet, somehow, underneath even the mess is something else, an entirely earnest belief that he will succeed in what he wants to do. He has a kind of religious devotion to his own future that would seem odd in someone so young, but Riza knows that he's always been like this. That's just who he is. Roy is a mess if for no other reason than that he tries so goddamn hard.

This glimpse into the raw center of the Roy Mustang Experience is gone almost as soon as it arrives, however, because Riza's phone buzzes loudly and obtrusively on her desk.

She gets up from her perch on her bed and grabs it.

"Who is it?" Roy asks, sitting up gingerly on his forearms to look at her from across the room.

"Winry," Riza says. She's incredible at keeping secrets, which makes up for her lack of nurturing skill as far as being an RA is concerned. There are things she knows about her friends that they don't know about each other, or themselves for that matter, but that has always stopped at Roy. She's never been able to keep things from him, and has never really wanted to. Roy is the exception to most of her rules; she prefers to be alone, unless it's with Roy. She never loans out her books, unless it's to Roy, because she knows he'll give them back to her in pristine condition aside from snarky marginalia he knows she'll get a kick out of. She doesn't like to drink, unless it's with Roy, because she knows they'll keep each other in check and watch each other's backs if things get out of hand. Roy may as well just be an extension of herself at this point.

"What'd she say?"

Riza reads the text to him: "Hey, I know this is weird, but are you in your room? I could really use someone to talk to."

Roy's brows knit over his eyes in the exact place Riza knows he'll have wrinkles in a decade or so. He'll have those and she'll have frown lines. They'll both have the faces of chronic worriers.

"That's not good," Roy says. "I bet Elric did something stupid."

"That's a pretty safe assumption," Riza says and begins typing out a reply, saying that, yes, she is in her room, and would be happy to talk with her.

Ten minutes later, there is a knock at Riza's door, and she opens it to see a distressed-looking Winry, in her first-day-of-class best, a shirt with a truly inscrutable metal band logo on it tucked into a cute, high-waisted skirt.

"Hi, Riza," she says, sounding conciliatory. "Sorry for the weird, cryptic message, it's just that, for once, something happened and I can't really talk to anyone about it, because they're all involved. And you're my RA, and you hung out with me at the party, and--"

Riza waves a hand at her, brushing away her worries. "It's no trouble at all. Well, there is some slight trouble, actually." She opens the door wider, giving Winry a view of Roy, lying prone on her bed. He waves awkwardly at Winry, and Winry covers her mouth with her hands. 

"Oh my god, what happened?"

Roy says "It's a long story" at the same moment that Riza says "He fell down a flight of stairs," causing Winry to look even more confused.

"He can't really stand up right now," Riza explains. "Meaning that, if you want this to be confidential, we'll have to go somewhere else to talk."

"It's not confidential, exactly," Winry says. "It's just...Al, Ed, and Paninya are kind of all of my friends right now, and they're sort of all implicated. Well, not Al, but he's Ed's brother, so I'd rather not talk to him about it." She looks over at Roy. "Would you mind listening to me rant?"

"Are you ranting about Elric? Because that sounds entertaining."

Winry giggles, honest-to-God giggles. Even with a bloody leg and a face puffy from crying, Roy can still make girls giggle. Unbelievable. "I am, actually."

"Then please," Roy says, slapping on that trademarked smirk for good measure. "Continue."

Riza moves out of the doorway to allow Winry inside and pulls out her desk chair to give her a place to sit. She returns back to her spot sitting on the edge of her bed and gets comfortable.

"So, I might have done something stupid," Winry says, obviously embarrassed. 

"How stupid?" Riza asks.

She takes her hair out of her ponytail, only to immediately grab the hair again and twirl it into a messy bun on top of her head. "Ed and I got into a fight at that party at Havoc's, and I was drunk and mad and so I may have agreed to go on a date with Kimblee."

Roy looks positively gobsmacked. Riza thinks that if he had been drinking something, he definitely would have spit it out. "You  _what_?"

Winry's face tints with an embarrassed blush. "I know, it was stupid, but--"

"Okay, so there's a spectrum of dumb drunk decisions," Roy says, sitting up for emphasis. "And agreeing to go on a date with Kimblee is definitely near the far end of it."

"I just--"

"He's a complete slime-ball," Roy continues, talking over Winry and causing Riza to fix him with a withering glare, because Winry is getting progressively more and more uncomfortable as he picks at her (admittedly stupid) decision. "And he's also got a thing for freshman girls. He's made a reputation for himself as being really pushy with them. I wouldn't trust him further than I could throw him. I can't believe you would--"

"Roy." Riza snaps. He stops immediately. She knows that his heart is in the right place, but Roy does not deal well with people he deems to be stupider than him, which is most people. He's honestly too hung up on the stupidity of agreeing to go on a date with Kimblee to be of any help to her, and if he could walk, Riza would not hesitate to kick him out of her room.

"Sorry," Roy says, lying back down. "I just...really hate that guy. He's rubbed me the wrong way since we were freshmen, and since he's started living on the other side of Central, I've had to see a lot of him recently. He's a creep, and I just don't want anything to happen to you."

"I don't either," Winry says quietly, looking down at her hands. "And I don't really want to go on the date. I was just feeling vindictive, and I wanted to prove to Ed that I didn't need him, but then I managed to dig myself into an even deeper hole--"

"Is that even possible?" Roy says, at which point Riza knocks his leg with her elbow, causing him to hiss in pain. "Okay. Got it. Sorry again."

"It is, actually," Winry says, laughing despite her embarrassment. "Because I managed to convince Ed to make it a double date. And so on Tuesday night, we're all meeting up at Cinco de Mayo. Me and Kimblee and Ed and Paninya."

"That is..." Riza glares down at him again, and before he can stick his foot further into his mouth, he ends on a noncommittal "unfortunate."

"Yeah, no kidding," Winry says. She sighs deeply. "This is all just so stupid. All I wanted to do was for Ed to realize how much I like him, and I thought that this party would be the best time to do that, but he was being an ass, and so I got mad and just made everything worse."

"Could I offer some advice?" Riza asks, as tenderly as she can, because Winry is obviously terrified. She's glad that Roy was stopped before his tirade reached his inevitable conclusion, which is that Kimblee has been known to be more than just "pushy" with women. He's basically a sociopath, and has no conception of empathy and no qualms about using people for his own personal gain. "I would tell Kimblee as politely as you can that you changed your mind and that you don't want to go anymore."

"I don't think that's such a good idea," Roy interjects. "As much as it pains me to say this, because the thought of that snake eking any enjoyment out of life causes me physical distress, he's been known to react rather badly to women who spurn his advances. I would wait until the date is over, when you're with two of your friends, and then leave with them."

Riza grimaces. She doesn't want Winry to go on a date with anyone she doesn't want to, especially not Kimblee of all people, but Roy does have a point. Kimblee is dangerous, and she wants Winry to put herself in as little danger as possible. Turning him down on her own would possibly put her in harm's way, but then there was always the possibility that after the date he wouldn't be satisfied either. There was no clean way out of this.

Winry looks to be on the verge of tears, and Riza marvels at the fact that not one, but two people will have cried in her room in one afternoon. Even being an RA, not much crying has taken place in her dorms over the years. 

"I just wish Ed hadn't been such a dick to me."

Riza's glad that she isn't putting the blame for this clusterfuck on herself. This is just as much Ed's fault as it is hers. 

She isn't sure whether drunk stories about her friends would cheer Winry up as much as it cheered up Roy, and so she stands, walking over to her electric kettle and flicking it on, grabbing a mug and placing a bag of English Breakfast into it. 

"Are you making me tea?" Winry asks, voice thick with tears and surprise.

"I know it always makes me feel better when people make me tea," Riza says, waiting for the kettle to burble and announce that the water is boiling. 

"I..." The tears that had been welling as thick jewels in the corners of Winry's eyes spill over onto her cheeks and she turns to Riza saying "That's so nice of you."

"It's really not much," Riza says, pouring the now-boiling water into the mug. "Do you want milk and sugar?"

Winry nods. "Yes, please."

She stays long enough to drink her tea, and once it has been finished, she stands. "I should probably head out. I have a three o'clock class."

Riza stands as well, opening the door for her. "Let me know if you need anything, alright?"

Winry nods. The tears have calmed down now, and the blotchy red in her cheeks has faded. "Um, could I give you a hug? Sorry if that's weird, but, uh, in my family we hug people who do nice things for us."

Riza blinks. She has heard of such families, in the same way she has heard of unicorns, and existential satisfaction. Her family expressed thanks with the professionalism of soldiers, by saying "Thank you," or, if feeling particularly demonstrative, by shaking hands. Hugs were not common in the Hawkeye household when she was growing up. Riza is mesmerized by this most simple of gestures, as if she has just witnessed some sort of bizarre natural phenomenon.

"Um," Riza says dumbly. "Sure."

Winry grins and reaches forward, wrapping her arms around Riza's torso and squeezing hard.

You know, Riza isn't sure when she was last hugged. She thinks that hugging should be like riding a bike, or tying your shoelaces, in that you never really forget how to do it, and yet here she is, standing stiff as a freshly starched shirt as Winry hugs her like she's trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

She thinks that she's probably supposed to reciprocate in some form or fashion, and so she tries, wrapping an arm around Winry and giving her two small pats on the back, pat pat, like knocking on a door. 

And then Winry disentangles herself and smiles, face as bright as if she had never been upset to begin with, and says "I really appreciate this. Seriously."

"Any time," Riza says, and she means it. She always says that she's available for any of her residents whenever they need her, but she feels an odd kind of protectiveness over Winry. Maybe it's because she's somehow managed to stumble into her friend group, or because they look slightly similar. Riza has no siblings, and so maybe it's some kind of lizard brain response, to protect something that looks like your genetic material. 

Or maybe it's just because she likes her. Watching Winry walk down the hallway and then down the stairs and out the building, she thinks that must be it. Winry Rockbell is singularly, supremely  _nice_. You don't see that every day.

When she closes the door, Roy says, from her bed, "You hug like a baseball coach."

"Fuck off," she replies, taking her desk chair back and sitting down.

Roy exhales, and Riza can see his hands itching toward his jeans pocket, clearly wanting a cigarette, but being trapped inside. She takes a small amount of pleasure in the fact that he can't kill himself when he's in her room. It's going to be significantly more difficult for him to smoke if he has to hobble outside every time the nicotine goes grabbing at his lungs.

"He doesn't deserve her," Roy says, staring pensively at the grimy, cracked ceiling of Riza's dorm room.

"Kimblee doesn't deserve anyone, to be fair," Riza says, resting her chin on her palm. There are few people Riza can say definitively that she hates, but she finds that she wouldn't be hugely upset if Kimblee up and died. The world would be better off for it.

"No, not Kimblee," Roy says. "Although I agree with you. I mean Elric. That girl is so sweet, and he's a little jackass. He's so emotionally constipated that I'm amazed he can hold a conversation."

Riza looks at Roy Mustang, king of emotional constipation himself, and shrugs. "I don't know. He reminds me a little bit of you when you were a freshman, actually."

Roy sputters so hard that he actually swings his leg off the bed, knocking it against the bedpost and causing him to let out a string of colorful, creative curse words.

Riza laughs. She was mainly saying that to piss him off, but she wasn't lying. Ed reminds her a lot of Roy when he was younger, and watching Roy flounder and curse as he maneuvers his bum leg back onto her dinky dorm room bed, she thinks that he'll be okay. Winry sees the kind of potential in him that Riza knows is there. She wishes she could peek into the future three years from now and see what kind of man he'll turn out to be.

"I wish any person wanted to fuck me as much as the universe does," Roy says through gritted teeth.

Riza thinks that Ed will turn out to be just like Roy. Completely hopeless.

* * *

Winry hates the label "girly girl," not because she thinks it's arbitrary and stupid, which it is, but because it doesn't fully describe her. "Tomboy" doesn't help either. She likes cute dresses and frilly things and baking, but she also likes math and machine parts and doing things with her hands. She's quite in touch with her emotions, but the emotion she's probably most in touch with at any given time is anger. She loves pretty earrings almost as much as she likes beating her male friends arm wrestling. Nothing quite seems to fit. It's at times like these that she is reminded of how the patriarchy is bullshit.

But still, she finds herself cursing her luck that she isn't girly enough, and also that she got randomly assigned to live with the butchest bisexual on campus, because Paninya is exactly no help when it comes to getting ready for their dreaded double date. Well, dreaded for her anyway. Paninya has a new fake ID that she's been itching to try, and there's nothing quite like half-price margaritas at a shady Mexican restaurant. 

Winry has always been bad at doing her hair, which is why she usually wears it up. The only person who's ever really been any good at doing her hair is Ed.

She grumbles under her breath as she puts on her liquid eyeliner, a task that her steady hands were practically made for, right alongside building fighting robots in her spare time.

"What's eating you?" Paninya asks. She's in her usual ensemble of camouflage cargo pants and a black tank top, never quite seeing the need to grow out of army brat chic. "You've been in a shit mood all day. Shouldn't you be psyched? A senior asked you out. That's, like, impressive."

"I guess," Winry says, putting on mascara. She doesn't feel hugely impressive. She feels like she's going undercover to expose some underground crime lord. She feels nervous. "What should I do with my hair?"

Paninya shrugs. "I dunno. Ponytail?"

"I always wear it in a ponytail."

"It's a date, Winry, not the Miss America pageant. I don't think it matters. I think Kimblee will be into you either way."

Winry knows that the phrasing is both perfectly normal and completely innocuous, but Paninya's unintentional innuendo makes her shudder slightly. Plus, there's no easy way to tell her that she doesn't care what Kimblee thinks about her hair but does care about what Ed thinks. You know, Ed, Paninya's date. What a complete and utter shitstorm she's gotten herself into.

But, you know, what better way to broadcast how Completely and Totally Fine she is than to go ask her Very Platonic Best Friend to do her hair? That's just passive-aggressive enough that she thinks he might actually get the hint.

"I'll be back in a minute," Winry says, getting up from her desk and ascending the three flights of stairs to the fourth floor.

She can hear music from inside of Ed and Al's room: Death Grips, what Ed always listens to when he's anxious and needs to get psyched up for something, like for seducing Paninya. Great. Maybe this won't work.

She knocks loudly, having to be heard over MC Ride screaming that he's "in your area." She bets the other boys on his hall are having a grand old time with that playing.

Winry expects Al to get the door, anticipating Ed to be deliberating frantically between this band T and that band T, this pair of ripped, dark-wash jeans and the other pair of ripped, dark-wash jeans, but it's actually Ed, looking remarkably somber.

"Winry? What are you doing here?"

 _This is a bad idea_ , Winry thinks immediately upon seeing him. She's managed to avoid him since the incident at the party, which may, actually, be the longest they've ever gone without seeing each other ever, and she hadn't anticipated the sheer visceral reaction she would have upon seeing him again. She's waylaid on every side by emotions: anger, sadness, fear, and, underneath all of it, a tiny kernel of happiness at seeing her best friend again, regardless of circumstances.

"Would you mind doing my hair?" she asks, trying to make her face and voice as impassive as possible, which is hard. "You know I've always been shit at it."

Ed's hair is braided back from his face, which he only ever does on nice occasions, and she can't help but think he looks handsome. Not  _hot_ , nor  _attractive_ , but  _handsome_. She's fucked.

He looks like this wasn't what he was expecting, which, Winry thinks, makes sense. He probably thought she was coming down here to put the fear of God in him, and she kind of wishes she were. 

"Oh, uh, sure. Come on in."

Their room looks a hell of a lot nicer now that they've unpacked things, but there's a very distinct divide down the middle between Ed's stuff and Al's. Al's room is practically immaculate, everything collected onto economically organized shelving units, and Purrseidon is snoozing contentedly at the foot of Al's bed. He's doing something on his computer when Winry walks in, and he beams.

"Winry! I feel like I haven't seen you in ages!"

"It's only been two days, Al," she says, although he's right. It feels like it's been forever.

"Purrseidon's missed you," Al says, and Purrseidon opens a single large eye to look at her before closing it again. Yeah, the cat totally missed her.

"So what do you want me to do with your hair?" Ed asks.

This is a talent of Ed's that not many people know about, but he's actually great at doing people's hair. He used to do Winry's all the time for dances and stuff when they were kids, and it's allowed Winry to become complacent enough to never have to learn on her own. She hadn't thought about how that might not continue once they got to college.

"I don't know, maybe like a French braid or something? Nothing too fancy. It's just a Mexican restaurant."

Ed nods. He doesn't seem like his usual fiery self. Maybe he's just thinking about Paninya. After all, they really did seem to hit it off at that party. They were practically made to chug beers arm-in-arm together.

Ed nods. "Alright, come here." Ed grabs his hair brush (a horribly tacky thing with a flaming skull design on the back) off of his desk and sits at the foot of his bed. His knees are wide, and he pats the space between them, motioning for Winry to sit down.

Winry does so, sitting on the floor in front of Ed's bed, between his feet. He takes the hair tie out of her hair, and (Winry hates to admit it) she shivers. This used to be such a normal thing for the two of them, but now it's like nothing they do can just be the thing itself, it always has to be some symbolic representation of their relationship. Everything is so laden with metaphor now that it makes her head swim, and she hates it. She misses when things were simple and small.

He runs the brush gently through her hair, working out all the tangles, before reaching up with his fingers and pulling back her bangs, beginning to plait her hair.

This, she thinks as Ed's fingers deftly weave her hair away from her face and down her neck, is the Ed she fell in love with. Because beneath all the piss and vinegar is a supremely caring person, someone who loves fiercely and tenderly and will braid her hair for her in preparation for a date that isn't with him. Winry feels tears pricking up behind her eyes again and wills them down with sheer concentration, because she spent too long on her makeup to ruin it now because Ed's fingers feel nice in her hair. That'd be stupid.

He finishes quickly ( _too quickly_ , she thinks) and binds the bottom of her braid with her hair tie. He pats her shoulder to signify that he's done and she stands to regard herself in Ed and Al's mirror. She really does look great. The outfit isn't entirely what she would wear every day, and she's wearing more makeup than she usually would, but Ed always knows how to braid her hair with just the right amount of softness in it. Somebody else would make it look harsh, but she thinks, looking at herself, that she honestly looks pretty.

If only it weren't going to be wasted on Kimblee.

"Thanks, Ed, it looks great," Winry says with the first genuine smile she's given all day.

He shrugs, already looking away from her to fiddle with his laptop's music player. "Yeah, whatever, no problem."

He doesn't seem like he's going to be paying her any more attention right now, and so she turns to walk out the door. "Well, I guess I'll see you at the restaurant."

"Yeah, I guess," he says, still looking at his laptop. She stands awkwardly for a moment, waiting to see if he'll turn around, but when he doesn't, she says a quiet "See ya, Al," and walks back to her room.

When she walks back into her dorm, Paninya looks up at her. "Whoa, nice 'do. Who did it?"

"I got the RA to do it," she lies.

In a final moment of bravery, she lets Paninya talk her into wearing her one pair of high heels to the restaurant, because if she's doing this, she doesn't want anyone to say she half-assed it.

Even though she's pretty sure she could take most people in a fight, and Paninya is frankly frighteningly jacked herself, they're still two young women out alone at night, and Ed kindly offered to walk them over to the restaurant. And, obviously, because Paninya is there.

She realizes as they walk out of the building to see Ed standing not in a band shirt and ripped jeans, but in his red suit jacket and a band shirt and ripped jeans, that she's never seen Ed on a date before. He didn't date around much when they were growing up, and in the back of her mind she always thought that his first date would probably be with her at some point. And, she supposes, it kind of is. Although it's more  _next to her_ than  _with her_. 

"You ladies ready?" Ed asks, Docs planted firmly on the pavement.

"Fuck yeah I am," Paninya says, a hand on each hip. "I haven't had a margarita since spring break of junior year. I'm fuckin' jacked."

"What about you, Win?" Ed asks. "Excited for your first real college date?"

She slaps on a smile so fake that her jaw hurts. "Yeah! Totally! Kimblee's such a great guy, and you know me! I just love dates! And boys! Just me, Boy Crazy Winry, going on another date!"

Okay, even she knows that she's putting it on a  _little_ bit too thick, but there's no point in pouting, because Ed's not going to do anything. He's made his bed, and so has she, and they're gonna lie in their completely separate beds and accept the consequences.

Which is, of course, when her ankle twists.

Winry is a combat boot kind of girl. Not a Doc Martens girl, necessarily, but sturdy work boots, like the kind Pinako wears. They're the most comfortable, versatile shoes you'll even own, and so she's never really had to develop the kind of ankle strength or coordination required for walking in high heels. Her high school experience did not prepare her for this, and so she begins to fall and prepares herself to scrape her legs on the concrete, just like Roy Mustang. Then Riza can have  _two_ invalids in her room. How grand. But, on the bright side, that'd be a convenient excuse to get out of her date with Kimblee. She can't really go on a date if she can't walk.

But she doesn't fall. Instead of feeling concrete scrape against her skin, she feels two suit-jacketed arms catch her, and her nose fills with the scent of cheap cologne. Cheap but nice. It smells like good intentions. It smells like Ed.

Because Ed, using some sort of cat-like reflexes, has managed to catch her before she fell. They freeze, both slightly unsure about what had just happened to them, and Winry notices with no small amount of pleasure that Ed's cheeks are as red as his jacket.

He helps her back onto her feet and dusts imaginary dust off of his sleeves. 

"Jeez, Winry, I forgot you were such a fucking klutz." 

She suppresses a smile. She knows this game. They've been playing it since they were kids. "Well, it's a good thing you're so close to the ground; you didn't have to move too far to catch me."

They continue volleying like this the whole walk to the restaurant, with Paninya tailing them and laughing continuously. 

She's missed him. Even if he's a massive dick and got her into this mess, he's her best friend, and she's missed him, and she just has to survive this date and then things will go back to the way they were before.

Hopefully.

 


	4. Love is Going to Lead You by the Hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ed begins preparations for the worst date of his life, Ling eats an absurd amount of oreos, and Roy is a nerd.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yo we are sorry for the delay- we both graduated from college so that was wild and time-consuming. But HEY no more school! So this fic is far from dead, ya'll. Also this chapter is (super long holy fucking god) and also a true humdinger of a good time so ENJOY!

**Hours before date: 1**

Ed had wanted to duck out on this thing from the very beginning.

The next morning after the Central party, he woke up feeling like someone was beating the inside of his skull, coupled with a mouth as dry as the Sahara, and the distinct shame of one who most-definitely-spent-a-couple-hours-curled-up-on-a-linoleum-floor-puking, but none of this, absolutely none of it, felt as bad as remembering the horrible things he'd said to Winry. To say Ed felt like "garbage" would not only be an understatement, but an insult to garbage everywhere.

He honestly hadn't remembered most of the night until an annoyingly chipper Alphonse with his silent pal Lan Fan had informed him of pretty much every stupid thing he had done that entire hellish night. The only thing that made him feel a little better was that he had apparently nearly made Roy cry over an empty bottle, and that Ling had smacked his head on a coffee table.

After a few days engaging in some rare introspection and coming to terms with the fact he was an irredeemable asshole, Ed decided the best course of action was to dig up whatever dirt he could on this Kimblee character- as Winry's best friend, of course. He couldn't in all good conscience cancel the date without at least ensuring this guy was safe, right? That would be irresponsible. No, truly, this was the only thing that could be done at this point, Ed had no other choice.

Ed also, unfortunately, knew very few upperclassmen in which to question.

* * *

**Hours before date: 8**

"Oi, Colonel!"

Ed was pleased to see Roy stop in his tracks to pinch the bridge of his nose and mutter angrily under his breath, he'll be indebted to Havoc forever for telling him that nickname.

"What is it this time... Elric." Roy said levelly, the pause between "time" and "Elric" suggesting he had gone through a few choice adjectives he would like to call Ed before finally settling on his actual name. Normally, Ed would love nothing more than to pick on Roy Musty, but if he wanted answers about Kimblee he'd need to play nice(-ish). So, for the first (and hopefully last) time Ed was determined to approach Roy with civility and tact.

"It's nothing bad, I swear." Roy raised a questioning eyebrow and Ed actively suppressed himself from making a joke about how silly he'd just noticed this guy's hair was and raised his hands up in mock surrender. "Listen, I  _swear_ , scout's honor."

Roy pursed his lips, Ed could practically see the gears ticking behind those hideous bangs. After a few seconds of serious contemplation, and what Ed is pretty sure was Roy mumbling something about Ed not possessing the moral compass necessary for scouthood, Roy Mustang, R(esident). A(sshole)., finally turned fully towards Ed, crossing his arms and planting his feet firmly on the ground. 

"Well go on and tell me what it is you need, Elric, I don't have all day."

 _Man, what a tool,_ Ed thought as he shot Roy one of his winning smiles.

"Thanks for your time,"  _I know how much you value the five minutes between class to check and see if Pitchfork's updated._ "I don't know many seniors so I don't really know who else to ask- but I was wondering if you possibly knew this guy. Name's Kimblee? He was at Central... said he knew you." The last part was a blatant lie, but Ed didn't know who else to ask without seeming like a stalker.

There was a long pause, with Roy looking at Ed like he'd just been told everyone knows he makes Riza order his fancy cappuccinos for him at Starbucks and pretend they're hers.

" _Kimblee_?" He finally answered, disdain dripping from his words like venom. "Don't tell me you've gotten involved with fucking _Kimblee?_ "

 _Yikes, this is going poorly._ Ed sorta regretted everything in his life that led him to this point, because as non-threatening as any man in a cardigan is just by virtue of existing, he found himself suddenly very much aware of the fact that Roy is actually a pretty intimidating fellow if you look past the awful hipster aesthetic he tries so hard to maintain.

"I haven't!" Ed finally answered, growing defensive. "But Winry, she-"

"I mean I knew you weren't the brightest person I've ever met," Roy barreled ahead, completely ignoring Ed's words, "but to get wrapped up in Kimblee's bullshit before you even hit second semester is just impressively bad, even for you."

Ed clenched his fists, his vision tinging that all too familiar red it always seems to get when dealing with this jackass. And to think he'd actually planned on being nice. Ha.

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" He asked, seriously contemplating taking all his anger about this whole situation out on Roy's face with a swift kick of his boot.

Roy chuckled, still talking like he was barely addressing Ed but rather musing aloud. "Well... actually, not very surprising. You all deserve each other." He shrugged and turned to walk away, swinging his messenger bag over his shoulder and waving an arm nonchalantly in farewell. "Have fun, Elric. Tell Kimblee to go die for me." 

Ed began to taste blood from where he was biting through his cheek, and he stood in the middle of the walkway as students passed around him clenching and unclenching his fists for a few minutes while he attempted to calm down. He had a feeling this was exactly what Roy had intended to do: get a rise out of him, and the fact that it had worked only made him angrier. It was a vicious cycle. 

After he calmed down a bit he began to walk back to his dorm, running through a list of people in his mind that he could possibly gather information off of, which is when he realized he'd missed out on the blatantly obvious choice.

* * *

 

**Hours before date: 5**

 

"Sweet Eddo, how are ya!"

Ed awoke with a start, to see Ling hovering over him with the ever-present smirk adorning his face. Ling had been out of his dorm for lunch when Ed had swung by at noon, so he'd sat outside to wait and apparently fallen the fuck asleep on the disgusting dorm floor. Someone had drawn a penis on his arm.

"Urgh... what time is it?" Ed asked, brain still slow from sleep.

Ling looked down at a Captain Crunch watch on his left wrist, brow furrowed in concentration.

"Hmm... This watch doesn't have any batteries," Ling answered gravely.

"It's 2 PM," a voice calmly uttered from behind Ling. Ed had thought that black mass was Ling's shadow, and in a way it was since it was Lan fan.

"2 PM?!" Ed shouted, scrambling to his feet. "How is it already 2? How long was I asleep, how long was- I- how long do you eat _lunch?"_

Ling snorted, and made a gesture to Lan Fan that amounted to "can you  _believe_ this guy?" before turning back to Ed.

"Ed my man, if it was up to me I would never stop eating lunch," He gave Ed strangely consolatory pat on the shoulder, "Now why are you here, hmm? Nervous about your date? Wanted some advice from the suavest ladies' man you know?"

Now it was Lan Fan's turn to snort. Ling spun around and pouted in a perfect imitation of a kicked puppy, which only made Lan Fan chuckle louder.

"You and I both know you haven't gone on a date in several months," she said with perfect equanimity, only the faintest idea of a smirk betraying her remark as anything other than a simple comment about Ling's love life (or lack thereof).

"Eeee... Lan fan! Why are you so meeeeean!"

"I'm not mean, just honest."

"That's essentially the same when the truth is that painful!"

"Well, then maybe you should change your Tinder bio to something other than 'I love being a meme girl'."

"But I DO love being a meme girl!"

"I hardly see how-"

"Can you two stop bickering like an old married couple for even two seconds and just hear me the fuck out?" Ed finally interrupted. "I've sat on this dingy floor for hours and I'l be damned if I leave here with nothing but a penis drawn on my arm."

Ling turned to Ed with the smile plastered back on his face, immediately over the lack of dates situation that had consumed him only a few seconds prior. In contrast, Lan Fan was sputtering like a stalled engine, her cheeks as crimson as Ed's favorite suit jacket.

"Our bad Ed-ominable Rex!, what'd ya need?" Ling asked amicably, oblivious to Lan Fan's abject horror.

"I- I- we- I- we're  _not_ married!" She finally spat out, each word sounding like it was dragged out against her will. Ling turned to her, quickly becoming concerned when he saw her reddened face.

"Is something wrong, Lan Fan?" He put a concerned hand on her shoulder, "Do you need some water?"

Lan Fan's eyes darted from Ling to the hand on her shoulder about three times before she hurriedly stepped away, pushing Ling's hand off and clearing her throat.

"I'm fine, I'll just... leave you two," she muttered, taking off at a sprint down the hall before Ling could open his mouth in protest.

Ling stood staring down the hall, his expression unreadable. Ed wasn't sure what he'd just witnessed and he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to know, either. Ed wasn't one to stick his nose in other people's business, especially two individuals like this he scarcely knew and barely understood. This would have been a great time to have Winry around. The more agreeable of the two of them, Winry had quickly become an expert at being a caring and thoughtful individual- she'd know exactly what to say in order to dispel whatever strange emotion was eating away at Ling. Ed on the other hand, was complete shit at interpersonal relationships. Hence why he was here in the first place.

"Well.." Ed started, unsure what to say since Ling was still staring down the hallway like he could make Lan Fan re-materialize through pure concentration alone. "That was fucking weird."

Ling finally turned around, the smile back on- albeit slightly strained. "Lan Fan is my best friend," he said simply, though the implication "so watch your mouth" is plainly visible through his body language. "So what do you need, Ed? Let's go in my room and chat- it's almost snack time."

"You- you just had lunch!" Ed protested as he followed Ling into his dorm, which he had actually never been inside. In Ed and Al's room there was a relatively clear and equal divide that showed which side each of them occupied. Ling and Roy's dorm was more 90% Ling's shit and 10% Roy's shoved into a corner. It looked like Ling's possessions were a virus that Roy's stuff was trying to escape, and failing. Roy had obviously tried to gain ground by putting up posters of his dweeby bands over the walls only to have them papered over by Ling's various collection of movie posters, cut out comics from the funny pages, restaurant menus, and shelves upon shelves of Amiibo and rocks that Ling lovingly pointed out to Ed and described as "dope and aesthetic as fuck". Ed counted at least five half open family sized boxes of sugary cereal and twice as many game controllers. It was a complete mess; it was absolute anarchy; it looked so fucking fun.

"Your room is cool as hell, dude," Ed said, not even trying to hide his admiration as Ling poured Oreos into a bowl and offered them up to him.

"Snack time!" Ling said in a sing-song voice, shoving a couple cookies in his mouth before throwing himself onto the couch in the middle of the room, long limbs sprawled haphazardly over the arm rests. Ed leaned back in the available arm chair and followed suit, happily munching on three double stuffed Oreos. After a few minutes of intense cookie consumption where Ling and Ed finished off an entire sleeve of Oreos, Ed finally cleared his throat and decided it was time to get to business.

"So, Ling, you know a lot of people on this campus," he began, watching Ling for any sign of a negative reaction.

"Mhm..." Ling hummed, drinking a large glass of milk through an elaborate crazy straw. "That I do."

"So, uh... you know anything about a guy named Kimblee?" Ed watched as the milk going through the straw straw abruptly stopped, and Ling turned to him with a slightly raised brow.

"You want some dirt don't cha? This is about Winry... isn't it?" 

Now it was Ed's turn to blush and sputter. "No! I mean, yeah- of course it is! She's my best friend, what kind of  _friend_ would just let his uh...  _friend_ go on a date with some- some  _douche_ and not know anything about him!" Ed belatedly realized his voice had raised to a shout, and Ling was leaning forward with a knowing smirk on his face, waggling his eyebrows.

"Stop that," Ed said.

"Stop what?" Ling asked, increasing the pace of his eyebrow waggling.

"That... with your eyebrows, stop.

"You know what I think, Ed ma friend?"

"... I don't think I want to know what you think, Ling."

"I think-"

"No-"

"Youuuu-"

"Ling,  _stop!"_

"LIKE WINRY! YOU LIKE WINRY!" Ling finally shouted, jumping up from the couch to raise his arms up in the air, the remaining Oreos flying up and scattering across the room.

"Shut the fuck up you gossipy bastard!" Ed responded, frantically trying to get Ling to shut the hell up as the other man ran through the room shouting "Ed likes Winry" to the tune of "Frosty the Snowman". Eventually Ed simply tackled Ling, wrestling him to the ground and shoving one of the Floor-eos in his mouth.

"Gross!" Ling whined, spitting the cookie into one of Roy's mugs. "You play dirty, Ed- but I'll shut up... this time."

Ed snorted from where he sat on Ling's bed, picking dust bunnies and crumbs out of his once immaculate braid. "Gee, thanks." He pulled a noodle out of his hair and stared at it in disgust before flinging it onto Roy's bed. "Do you ever clean your floor?"

"No, of course not. That's the maid's job."

"You mean Roy?"

"Yeah, the maid, but enough about her- what are you going to do about the fact you're in love with your best friend and going on a double date with her and another man?"

It might have hurt less if Ling had just stabbed him. Ed doubled over in despair and groaned- grinding the palm of his hands into his eyes as if he could forcibly clear his mind of the image of Winry on Kimblee's greasy arm. He had no idea what he was going to do, he had no idea how he really felt, or truly- he simply did not currently have the emotional strength to actually sort through the storm of indecision that was his feelings towards Winry right now. He knew what everyone else thought and what they expected of course; he had a fake leg but he wasn't fucking blind. That pressure was almost worse than anything. Ed has screwed up a lot of things in his life but he wasn't going to screw up Winry. He didn't want to be pushed into some love confession because of this mess. She was more important than that, but then didn't that make him to blame for her being pushed towards Kimblee in the first place? What was the right answer? God, he had a headache. He brought his hands down from his eyes, balling them into fists so tight he could feel his arms shaking. This was just too much. He felt like he was going to fucking lose it. Something was going to have to break- him, this bed, the closest item, who fucking knows.  

As he sat there feeling distinctly like the soda cans he and Al use to aggressively shake only to throw them on the ground and watch them explode into the air like rockets, he heard the bed spring creak as Ling sat beside him, saying nothing. At first he tensed up, sure that Ling was about to do two of his least favorite things: Give him heartfelt advice or ask him to talk about his feelings, but after awhile he looked up to see Ling doing nothing more than staring ahead contently, as if he couldn't think of anything more enjoyable than silently sitting next to Ed while he shook with thinly veiled rage. They sat like that for awhile in companionable silence, something Ed honestly wouldn't have thought Ling capable of until now. It was strangely calming, and he could feel his heart rate slow and his mind clear after a few minutes of nothing, no expectations to talk, to explain, to understand- just... sitting.

Ed heaved a huge sigh, the tension in his shoulders mercifully dissipating for the first time all week. He started to feel less like a disaster and more like a human being, and the longer he sat there the more sure of himself he felt. He was Edward fucking Elric, not some average ass guy who was going to let a single date throw him off his game. What the fuck was he doing sitting there? He had shit to do.

He stood up abruptly, and Ling glanced up like he had totally expected Ed to just suddenly stand with a new sense of purpose after half an hour of complete silence.

"I..." Ed started, clearing his throat and hoping to sound more manly and less like the angry kid he felt like a minute ago. "I mean, thanks."

He expected Ling to say something like "for what" but instead he waved a hand dismissively before smiling up at Ed. "Anytime, friend."

Ed returned the smile with one of his own. "I'm going to buy you like, 5 more boxes of Captain Crunch."

Ling leaped up and hugged Ed with such force they stumbled backwards into the couch. Now that was more like the Ling he knew.

"I always knew we were meant to be, Eddo," Ling whispered, ignoring Ed's vehement protests and planting a big kiss on his cheek. "Now go... go get the girl!" With that he finally let Ed go, and Ed escaped through the door before he suffered from anymore displays of honest affection.

Now he just needed to get ready for the worst date of his life.

* * *

 

**Hours before date 0:**

_This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me_ , Ed thought, and that included the time Alphonse accidentally bleached his AJJ shirt. They'd finally made it to the restaurant and honestly, it was just garish and ludicrous enough that typically it would be 110% his thing. The whole place was decked out in an array of warm colors, fabrics and murals covering every square inch of wall that wasn't occupied by the bar or the wooden booths crafted to look like palm trees. It was an explosion of pretty much every Mexican restaurant stereotype with the added bonus of a staff that seemed to actually be enjoying themselves enough to be heavy-handed with those half price margaritas- but as they approached their booth and he saw ponytail guy's smug, undeserving face grinning up at him it was enough to convince him that going through with this horrible charade of a date was a terrible mistake.

"Glad to see you could make it, sweet girl," Kimblee said with a wide smile, even his voice reminded Ed of oozing liquid. 

Winry giggled and a blush spread accoss her cheeks. Ed had to start counting backwards from 100 in order to cool himself down enough to not reach over the remaining space and choke Kimblee with his stupid fucking bolo tie. 

Kimblee widened his smile even further at Winry's reddened visage, before turning his eyes to Ed and Paninya. "And hello, sweet girl's friends."

"Hey-o!" Paninya responded, setting herself firmly on the booth across from Kimblee, "So what are we ordering, margaritas?"

Ed grunted and sat down stiffly next to Paninya, watching intently as Winry settled down next to Kimblee- who only moved a fraction of the space necessary to give Winry proper room, in Ed's opinion.

Kimblee raised an eyebrow at Paninya's exuberance. "Are you telling me you guys are old enough to drink?"

Paninya grinned wickedly. "Hell no, but this piece of plastic here says otherwise," she said, triumphantly waving her fake ID, which glistened impressively even in the meager light of the restaurant. 

Kimblee chuckled. "My, my, how... innovative."

"Paninya is very industrious," Winry suddenly said so loudly it made Ed wince. "Uh... I mean, she's a real go-getter," Winry finished, laughing nervously. What the hell was wrong with her? She looked like she was about to have a stroke.

They continued on with casual- if not somewhat strained- conversation, mercifully interrupted by chips and salsa as well as margaritas. (Much to Paninya's disappointment, the staff barely even glanced at her card) As time went on Ed noticed Winry looking more and more uncomfortable, the volume of her voice getting so loud Ed opened his mouth to ask Winry to tone it the hell down, out of concern, before he looked and noticed that Winry and Kimblee's thighs were touching where they sat in the booth and Kimblee was creeping his hand up Winry's leg and under one of the pleats of her skirt. He quickly clamped his mouth shut, tasting blood from nearly biting his tongue in half. He felt his face reddening as his blood pressure rose, god damn it he was going to deck this guy he was going to commit murder he was going to-- no.

Ya know what? No. Just... **no**.

He _refuses_ to make a scene. Now is not the time, not on Winry's first date, not in a shitty Mexican restaurant, not within his first month of college- no. He was going to try this new thing called "keeping his god damn mouth shut". For once, Edward Elric  _was not_ going to get into a fight.

Ed managed to make it through the entrees being served without saying so much as a single openly aggressive thing. As Paninya and Winry told a story about how they had stayed up late one night listening to music they had both liked in middle school, Winry seemed to disentangle herself from Kimblee and Ed even managed to crack a smile and nod a couple of times like a civilized person. This was fine, he thought. This was normal, not being overcome with rage was how must people made it through life's trials and tribulations.

Then as the story finished and Paninya dug into the remainder of her burrito, Ed gulped down the last of his fajitas and glanced up to find Kimblee possessively encircling his hand around her waist while whispering words into Winry's ear he could only guess were unwelcome based on the frightened look on her face.

Ed weighed the pros and cons of casting aside his new-found resolve to stay out of trouble. He knew if anyone could take care of herself, it was Winry. He also knew Winry had a nasty habit of letting everyone (aside from him) push her if it meant keeping the peace. He also felt very strongly that anyone who made Winry feel anything resembling fear or discomfort deserved to have their head shoved through a window.

Kimblee pretended not to notice as WInry maneuvered his hand away from the hem of her skirt, responding by aggressively pulling her forward until any space between them on the bench was obliterated.

Ed made his decision. 

"So Kimblee," Ed started, taking a giant gulp of his nearly empty strawberry margarita before continuing. "I was just wondering... What's it like to be a senior and still hitting on freshman girls at shitty college parties, huh?" He took a perverse pleasure in watching Kimblee's eyebrows raise into his greasy, greasy hairline as he grabbed his margarita glass and downed the slushy remains in one go. "Mmm, refreshing. Also-" Ed gestured casually at Kimblee's wandering hand on the other side of the booth, "--I'd recommend you stop feeling up my best friend in public, or you won't leave this place with your hands." Ed sat his drained grass down firmly, making a satisfying clink on the counter-top. "We clear?" he asked, giving Kimblee his biggest smile.

The tension that had already been collecting among their unlikely party of 4 skyrocketed as Ed sat, feeling his smile grow increasingly more manic, staring into the depths of Kimblee's eyes. Ed didn't believe the eyes were windows into the soul or any of that crap, but the grain of truth in that statement was that eyes held a lot of emotion that others could pick up on-- not so with Kimblee. After a few seconds of tense silence Ed slowly realized he had found himself in a staring contest with someone whose eyes held zero depth or personage. Looking into his eyes felt like looking at wet asphalt at night; eerily shallow and nothing to see but the reflection of the overhead lights. Ed felt himself flinch as the seconds dragged on and Kimblee immediately broke into an immense smile, the opalescent white of his teeth reflecting the light back in a way that somehow made Ed feel queasy.

"Holy shit, dude." He vaguely heard Paninya mutter somewhere off to the side, breaking the silence. It was hard to reply, as his eyes were brimming with tears, now twitching uncontrollably as he tried not to lose whatever battle it was he and Kimblee were silently waging. The bastard only looked more and more smug with each passing second. How were his eyes not fucking burning? Ed seethed, fists clenched with the effort of not blinking and also not punching Kimblee's teeth into his creepy ass face.

"I... could you all maybe..." WInry began, glancing between Kimblee and Ed, both of whom were now starting to lean forward as they continued to stare into each other's eyes like they could telepathically set the other on fire if they only believed hard enough.

"I... I... oh, ENOUGH!" Winry finally huffed out, slamming her palms onto the table and standing up. Kimblee glanced up at her and Ed took this opportunity to blink gratefully, the burning in his eyes finally assuaged by the tears gathering in the corners. Jesus Christ this Kimblee character must have eyes of literal steel.

Paninya giggled and leaned back while taking a hearty sip of her drink. "Drop it girl, let 'em have it!" she said, offering Winry a thumbs up.

Winry blinked in confusion before furrowing her brow and nodding in understanding. "Err... Thanks, Paninya."

Paninya shrugged it off and motioned for her to continue with a casual wave of her hand.

"Do you want me to ask the child to leave?" Kimblee asked her, pointing to Ed.

"Who are YOU calling a CHILD?" Ed shouted, also slamming his palms on the table and standing up, knocking the salsa over in his haste and earning a distressed cry from Paninya.

"Why, the only one throwing a tantrum at the dinner table of course," Kimblee answered, not even bothering to look in Ed's direction. "It's unbecoming, and I typically like to spend my time with young ladies not getting them kicked out of restaurants so if you wouldn't mind waiting outside I'm sure I can call up your babysitter Mustang to take you home and tuck you in. Sound fair?" he asked, finally turning to glance at Ed with a sarcastically placating grin.

Ed sputtered, completely unaccustomed to having people insult him so thoroughly. 

"How about we both take this outside and I do the world a solid and rip off that disgusting ponytail and shove it down your throat, what do you say?" Ed responded, his voice a growl as he leaned forward and grabbed the front of Kimblee's shirt.

Kimblee glanced down at Ed's hands, the smile he had been wearing dropping with such abruptness that Ed started to question if it had even been there in the first place. Kimblee raised his own hands slowly, placing them over Ed's with a deceptive calm. His grip was so strong Ed thought for sure he was about to lose all of his fingers.

"Let. Go," Kimblee said slowly, the sound of his voice sending chills down Ed's spine as he gasped aloud from his fingers being crushed, he pulled back immediately with a snarl, before being quickly thrust forward as Kimblee reached over and grabbed the lapels of his blazer-- lifting him up and partway onto the table as he stood up and pulled Ed towards eye level.

Glancing into his eyes then, Ed felt the closest thing to fear he's felt in a long time. He slowly recognized with terrible clarity that he was completely outmatched. Kimblee's outward visage was a mask of calm, but his eyes felt like pits of tar Ed was quickly suffocating in. He struggled vainly, realizing that he had yet to fight anyone since the accident that took his leg and once again feeling the sting of wounded pride as he began to understand the severe limitations he was presently under. He could hear Winry shouting and begging them both to stop fighting as Kimblee began to whisper into his ear, so low he was sure no one could hear him other than Ed himself.

"I have killed people for less," he said, and something about his tone made Ed feel almost certain that he wasn't speaking figuratively, "Touch me again and I'll make the next four years very, very rough for you." He let Ed go, or more he slammed Ed downward onto the laminate table before shoving past Winry and out of the booth.

"Ed! Ed, are you okay?" He heard Winry ask, as she leaned forward and caressed his now aching head, shifting his face upward to glance up at her awkwardly.

"Ow..." Ed muttered in a haze of pain and shredded dignity, mixed in with a heady cocktail of residual fear, lust for revenge, and the actual heady cocktail he had gulped down while trying to look cool.

"Dude, that was wild!" he heard Paninya shout. "Oh- here comes security."

Ed tried to look but found his head swimming with the effort of moving it and his head lolled forward.

"Ed!" Winry shouted in distress, and a part of Ed's heart warmed at the concern in her voice despite the fact he was pretty sure he was both about to pass out and suffering from a concussion.

"Ed... just stay awake Ed, please," she appealed, her hands gently stroking back his hair. "I'm so sorry, Ed. I'm so sorry."

Ed tried to tell her it was not her fault, but his head only swam more with the effort of moving his lips.

"Is there a problem?" Ed heard an unfamiliar voice ask, the authoritative tone leading him to believe it was whatever security a place like this employed.

"Yes." Kimblee answered. "This boy here insulted me, I slammed his head rather hard into the table. Here's my portion of the bill- I'll be leaving now."

"Like hell you are!" Winry shouted, "That's called assault, asshole!"

Ed tried to mutter "that's my girl" but it came out more as "thh..mm guh.." He felt Paninya pat his shoulder in consolidation.

"Shut up, you backwoods piece of ass. Grown-ups are talking," Kimblee responded in a withering voice, earning an indignant shout from Paninya and Winry. "Here's a tip for the damages, and... emotional distress." Ed heard Kimblee mutter to the guard before sauntering off in the direction of the exit.

"Are you fucking serious, pal?" Paninya asked the guard, as he stepped aside to let Kimblee past.

The guard shrugged. "I have rent to pay. It's not my fault your friend here picked a fight with the most dangerous man here. Now get out before you scare away more of my customers." And with that anti-climactic statement their showdown ended, and Winry ran over to the side of the booth Ed was occupying and attempted to get him to stand up.

"Should we... should we uh... fuck, I'm drunk." Paninya said with a sigh, slurping down Kimblee's abandoned drink.

"Than maybe you should stop drinking?" Ed finally managed to slur out, the world calming down until he only felt slightly shaky. Sadly, the relief from spinning was now followed by a throbbing pain in his temple so strong he wondered vaguely if he was about to see his extra spicy chicken fajitas a second time.

Paninya contemplated Ed's advice as she finished off the last of the drink. "Mmm... nah. We should get you outta here, though."

"I agree." Winry said, "Ed, I'm going to stand up now, okay?" Her voice was so level and calm that Ed found himself nodding, despite the fact he hadn't realized until she asked that her right arm had been gently placed around his waist while his left arm was slung over her shoulder.

"Whatever you say Winry, whatever you say," he mumbled indistinctly, the periodic throbbing in his head leaving the whole world undeniably hazy.

"Pfft, I bet you wished he said that all the time- amirite Win?" Paninya said good-naturedly, elbowing Ed in the ribs and accidentally knocking him into Winry and promptly onto the floor.

"Damn it Paninya!" Winry shouted as she tried to pick Ed's limp body off the floor.

"I... I'm gonna hurl, Win- hold on--" Ed said, raising his hand to stave her off as he laid his cheek against the cool, disgustingly dirty tile floor of the restaurant. Ed had always been told he had a thick head, both as an insult and a general statement on his ability to take a punch, which is why as he laid on the floor probably collecting several new bacteria and viruses he marveled at the fact he had essentially been taken out by a table. Either Kimblee was well-trained, eerily strong, that table was made of diamond, or some strange combination of all three. He sadly contemplated the possibility that his soft, squishy brain was permanently damaged. First his leg and now this.

"I'm gonna be a vegetable..." he murmured sadly into the floor.

He heard Winry sigh above him as she picked his lifeless body up like a sack of potatoes. 

"You're not going to be a vegetable, Ed. You might be a bit concussed, we just need to take you home." She shifted his weight and Ed tried his best to plant his boots solidly on the ground as they sauntered forward, they maintained a (mostly) straight line but he felt a lot of that had to do with Winry's undeniable strength and willpower than any actual progress on Ed's part.

"Should we go to the... hospital?" Paninya offered meekly, as she stumbled a bit behind Ed and Winry, obviously about in as poor of a state as Ed when it came to any real assistance.

 "None of us have a car, none of us can afford the bills," Winry replied, her voice filled with a cool sort of determination. Ed knew better than anyone that when Winry needed to complete a task she essentially developed tunnel-vision, unable to see anything else or so much as rest until her job was complete. That's why she used to spent upwards of three days straight cranking out engineering projects like her life depended on it. He was certain she had already worked her way through every possibility available to them and knew exactly what course to take to ensure Ed's safety, he even noticed in an off-handed way that at some point she had unceremoniously kicked off her one and only pair of heels in order to better carry him off back to the dorms. It was one of the things about her that Ed found so god damn admirable, there was nothing and no one on this earth that could stop Winry Rockbell. 

"I'm sorry, Win," he said after a few minutes of silence. "This is all my fault," he added, after a beat of indecision. He felt her body tense a bit, before she shifted him into a more comfortable position on her shoulder and continued.

"Let's just focus on getting you home, okay?" she finally replied, and he nodded gratefully. With each step he felt himself becoming more and more lucid but he still wasn't entirely ready for the level of focus and seriousness that conversation would require.

"Yeah, okay," he said, throwing all of his energy into keeping his feet moving steadily forward.

"Yo! There's our dorm!" Paninya shouted excitedly after a few more minutes of walking. She ran up to the entrance and buzzed them in with her student ID, holding the inner door open triumphantly in order to allow Ed and Winry easier access.

"Paninya, I'm going to take Ed to our dorm since it's on the first floor, so I need you to do something for me, okay? Are you up for it?" Paninya nodded solemnly, obviously still very drunk but caught up enough in the seriousness of the situation to want to be of assistance.

"You can count on me!" she shouted with a dramatic salute.

"Alright," Winry said, utterly unfazed, "Go find Riza, Roy, Al- all three if you need, I don't care-- just find someone who is more in charge than the three of us and who could potentially know what to do, got it?"

"Got it!" Paninya shouted over her shoulder, as she was already rushing off in the direction of the stairs. Ed watched her trip over nothing before promptly jumping back up and running off again. That was comforting.

"We're fucked," he offered pragmatically, not at all concerned even though it was his own fate hanging in the balance.

Winry took a deep breath in preparation to let Ed know his cynicism wasn't going to get him anywhere and he should really put more faith into people when Paninya turned to run into the stairwell and instead bodily hit the wall.

  
"Wow, we might actually be fucked." Winry whispered, in equal parts defeat and amazement at the spectacularly bad turn they'd been dealt in such a short period of time.

"I really AM going to be a vegetable!" Ed wailed, feeling his body go limp from the effort.

  
"You're no- Jesus Christ you're heavy Ed, get yourself together!" Winry heaved his slumped down body up with a strained grunt and shuffled off in the direction of her dorm room.

  
Ed begrudgingly placed his feet forward and walked, staring at the carpet below him in fascination as they slowly crept down the stupidly long hallway. It felt like he'd spent hours of his life staring at the mottled gray, green, and blue fibers marked with an occasional vomit stain before they finally reached the stark white door of Winry's dorm.

  
"Ah, sweet, sweet musty salvation," he muttered, as he flung himself roughly forward and onto the love seat he'd watched Al and his dad move in what seemed like an eternity ago.

  
Winry was rolling her shoulder and wincing. "Damn, Ed. When did you get so heavy?" She grumbled, rubbing the back of her neck and popping it quickly, followed by a satisfying sigh.

  
Now it was Ed's turn to wince. "I've always thought it was so weird you could just pop your neck like that. Doesn't it hurt?" he asked, leaning forward to try and unlace his boots and then immediately regretting it when the pounding in his head transformed into a stomach-churning nausea.

"Oh god... I'm gonna hurl," he murmured, leaning back into the cushions of the love seat that still smelled slightly like Hohenheim's office. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on breathing slowly, in through the nose and out through the mouth, while the overwhelming urge to vomit gradually passed. He felt a sudden tug on his feet and opened one eye to peek down and see Winry untying his boots.

  
"You don't have to do that, Win," he muttered, realizing after she continued silently that this is the first time they'd been alone since the incident at the party.

He tensed up, suddenly more nervous than sick. This shouldn't be so weird, right? I mean... he and Winry had fought plenty of times throughout the years, it was nothing new. And it's not like they hadn't spent hours if not days alone together in the past: stooped over piles of books in the library when studying for tests, walking to and from school the year before Al joined them, or hanging in her room afterwards, her hunched over a bench working on some mechanical thing he'd never understand, him sitting cross-legged in the corner of her bedroom that had somehow become "his"-- books about various things he'd wished to study open around him in a wide arch, his own form of organized chaos.

  
Staring down at her now though, he couldn't deny something had changed. Not in the way he felt, the way he felt for Winry was comforting in that it was constant. She was a stabilizing force in a life that had become entirely too mobile, shifting under his already unbalanced feet. What had changed was the way he saw her, something he was acutely aware of now as he noticed how gently she handled the laces of his shoes. The thick strands of her light blonde hair obscuring her face as she diligently worked, she absentmindedly reached up to tuck a piece of hair that had come undone behind her ear, only for it to immediately fall back down again. She sighed softly in frustration and Ed had to work real hard to suppress a small laugh. The length of her hair had always been a fount of endless teasing between the two. In her line of work having such long hair made about as much sense as a surgeon having long, manicured nails. Still she kept at it with the sense of determination that was so decidedly "her", growing it out so long it was hard to imagine a time when she wasn't struggling to secure it with constantly breaking hair ties or grease smeared bandannas.

A smile began to pull at his lips as he thought about every way in which he'd seen Winry grow and change throughout the long years of their friendship together. From when she was a chubby-faced kid in overalls, mucking about in playground dirt, to the awkward preteen phase where they spent as much time bickering and mocking each other as they did "playing nice". Then finally their teen years, the years they truly became inseparable.

He remembered Winry at their first school dance, limbs still long and toothpick thin from her sudden growth spurt, shoulders holding up the pink spaghetti straps of the dress her mom had forced her in. He remembered staying up late with her to practice her first big speech, recalling with retroactive embarrassment how he'd been a complete nuisance by tossing a pretzel at her every time she stuttered until she finally wrestled the bag away from him. He also remembered her in his last year of high school, shoulders squared and defiant as she shoved some unknown kid into a locker who'd made the mistake of mocking him for "needing a girl to carry his shit around". He remembered even more distinctly how, despite the fact he was red-faced with shame and anger, he couldn't focus on anything in that moment but her-- her angry and defiant and strong, all for the sake of him.

  
All these memories flitted through his mind, and before he knew it the pain in his head, the pain of the whole night and all the days without her since then, dissipated. He took a deep breath and when he let it out he knew, for the first time in a long time Ed felt like he knew exactly what he wanted. Another strand of her hair made its way from her braid and he reached out slowly, moving to place it behind her ear before she noticed. She reached up simultaneously and touched his fingers instead, gasping softly in surprise before quickly looking up.

  
"Ed," she said, voice slightly hoarse with some emotion he couldn't quite place, but felt he knew nonetheless.

  
"Winry," she said simply, turning his hand to lightly touch her cheek, heart thrumming in nervous anticipation, hoping behind all hope that something would go right for once.

  
She closed her eyes, clasping her hand over his where it laid on her cheek, a soft sigh escaping her lips, almost inaudible if he hadn't been paying such close attention to every detail of her face.

  
"I missed you," she whispered, and his heart felt lighter than it had in years.

  
"I missed you too," he murmured in response, pleased to see a smile grace her lips.

  
He removed his hand and she finished removing his boots, before leaning back against the love seat, the same position she'd been in earlier in his dorm when he'd done her hair. He leaned forward with his forearms on his knees and pulled the braid through his fingers, undoing it and redoing it again with a steady motion. The room was quiet except for an occasional satisfied hum from Winry as he let her hair fall loose and gently ran his fingers over her scalp.

  
"I always loved it when you did my hair," she said, so softly he almost thought he'd made it up until she continued. "I was never any good at it. You always were. Your fingers are so gentle."

  
He felt a blush creep up his neck as his fingers stilled, taken off guard by the sudden praise. She shifted impatiently and he chuckled, quickly overcoming the temporary embarrassment and resuming the steady flow of his fingers through her hair.

  
"I was just happy you'd let me touch you," he said quietly, before realizing the obvious implications behind that statement. "Wait, oh god, not like that I'm so sorr-"  
He was cut off by Winry's sudden, loud laughter, and before he knew it he was laughing as well. The two of them doubled over as hysterical peals of laughter overtook them, the final remnants of the tension between them broken.

  
"I knew what you meant," she finally choked out behind giggles. "I mean, I think I did, I'm actually not sure- I mean I think I knew what sentiment you meant. Wow that was a weird way to phrase that. Am I babbling? I think I'm babbling, stop me if I'm babbling."

  
He clutched his head, overcome in silent laughter before putting an arm on her shoulder in comfort. "You-" he began, struggling between fits of laughter still shaking his entire core. "You, oh god, you- yeah, that is babbling. But it's okay, you're okay. I mean, you're more than okay, you're wonderful! I mean the babbling- that, that is okay. Oh god, am I babbling?"

  
She shook her head, opening her mouth to respond only to be overcome in a fresh wave of giggles. This is what Ed had missed the past few days, he thought, as he watched Winry's eyes crinkle at the corners and the way her cheeks turned pink from exertion. He'd missed the easiness. Around Winry, he was no one but himself. He wasn't a tragic backstory, he wasn't some punk kid, he wasn't a mask-- he was simply Edward Elric, and she was Winry Rockbell, and they were good. Everything was good.

Ed reached down and placed his hands on Winry's still laughing face, caressing her cheeks as gently as he was able.

"Ed?" she said in surprise, as he turned her to face him.

"Winry I-" he began, bending down until their faces were inches apart. Her eyes widened and he felt as if his heart was going to burst from his chest. God was he really about to do this?

"Yes Ed?" she said, voice breathless and perfect and amazing and _Winry._

Yeah, he was totally about to do this.

"I love yo-"

Before he could get the words out he felt himself flung back onto the love seat by the force of Winry standing up to meet their mouths together. Before he knew it she was on his lap and the soft pressure of her lips was everywhere; his jaw, his neck. his chin, his nose. Her arms were wrapped tightly around his shoulders and she was kissing him as if her life depended on it.

Ed sat back in complete shock, arms up in the air in a sign of surrender. Even as Winry kissed up his jaw softly, the warmth of her breath causing his cheeks to flush a deep crimson, he couldn't bring himself to touch her- for fuck's sake he hadn't even _asked_ her yet! And wasn't he supposed to be the one doing the kissing business?

"You stole my moment," he said, voice squeaking in a decidedly unmanly fashion, he cleared his throat and tried again. "Winry, you stole my fucking moment!"

She didn't stop kissing him, which didn't help his concentration much as she was now paying delicate attention to the curve of his neck. Instead she spoke her answer into his skin, making him shiver in a way that was also less-than-manly.

"I love you too," she whispered into his neck, then another kiss.

"I love you," she said, peppering kisses up until she reached his jaw.

"I love you, I love you, I love you," she said between kisses, until she reached his ear.

"Edward Elric... I love you," she said, and Ed's hands lowered and he hugged her around the waist. He hugged her so tight he was afraid he'd hurt her, but she only held on tighter. He held her for longer then he'd ever held anyone, he held her until his body shook with the effort, and still he kept holding her. He felt a single, hot tear trace its way down his cheek, but at this point he no longer cared. He just never wanted to let go.

"GUYS I MADE IT BA-- oh."

Winry screamed and fell off Ed's lap as Ed abruptly stood up, embarrassed to be caught in an emotional moment by Paninya and--  _ohfuckisthatroymustang_.

"God isn't real," Ed muttered in mortification, as he watched Roy double over in smug laughter at seeing Winry sprawled out on the floor and Ed-- standing there like a jackass in what was probably margarita stained clothing with a nasty forehead bruise.

From behind Roy, Ling leaned over to take a picture on his cell phone.

"Lan Fan will think this is hilarious!" Ling said happily.

Ed offered a hand to Winry and helped her up, she rolled her eyes but accepted it gladly-- even giving his hand a comforting squeeze before letting it go.

"Send that picture to me too, Ling!" Paninya said, leaning over his phone to help him with the caption.

"Me- haha, oh god- me too!" Roy said in between laughs, still receiving intense joy from Ed's distress.

Ed glanced over at Winry, and so she was laughing too. She gave him a small wink before walking over to give Ling her Snapchat handle. Ed found himself smiling, as far as confessions of love go-- they could probably be worse.

"Fuck it, send it to me too, Ling," he said, walking over to place an arm around Winry's waist.

"Don't worry dude, it's on the campus story."

"The WHAT?" Ed shouted, as everyone else lost their shit as they checked their own phones.

Well, that's one way to end a first date.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish I could draw just so I could make Ling's snapchat from the end of this tbh. Thanks for reading! Bonus points if you comment with what caption you think Paninya put on the snapchat


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